James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google
techcrunch.comHonestly, this whole thing is just ugly. I read what he wrote. It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth.
Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.
I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. I also see people hired who are minorities but also great at their job. It's not a binary pattern. But those who are hired just because they are a POC or female, yet are terrible at their job stand out. People notice it, but few say it.
Our company recently hired a black woman as a "Software Engineer" who can't write a SQL statement. She has a "taken some tutorials" level of programming skill as far as I have noticed and produces things very, very slow. People notice this, and it makes them angry. I'm sure the other engineers talk about this even more when I'm not in the room. Our boss is proud of how much he is "making the team diverse" yet it's only going to cause problems for the team.
I like to think I was hired based on my skillset, not to improve the numbers. I've worked hard to get here. People likely forget or don't care how "diverse" I am when I am working because I produce. And I fully support bringing in diverse candidates, it's essential to get those viewpoints, so long as they are a qualified candidate to start with.
I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. Almost all of the women from my social circle are smart, pragmatic, driven and successful yet have zero interest in a technical career. They excel in their given industries but ours they want no part of. I don't believe intelligence is more prevalent in either gender, but I do believe there are some traits that shape who we are.
That's something that's rarely addressed, for fear of being ostracized.
As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
I read what he wrote. It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth.
Many of the media interpretations of what James Damore wrote were very biased, and effectively amounted to hit pieces. His use of terms like "Trait Neuroticism" were direct uses of psychological terms which just sound bad as everyday English. Evolutionary Biology also tends to have a "dismal" feeling to it, like Economics can.
One can't take fields like Evolutionary Biology and Economics as morally prescriptive. In that direction lies madness, clearly. However, to then take a knee-jerk ideological stance towards science and declare that everyone must be equal inside is just the West's version of Lysenkoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
As is usually the case, reality is complex, requires a nuanced understanding, and might sound depressing if you give it a pessimistic read:
+1.
Most of the pieces about the memo didn't take time to highlight that "neuroticism" and "agreeableness" refer to Big-5 personality traits, not the everyday understanding of the words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between descriptive and normative statements.
Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between statements about distribution of something within a population, and statements about all members of that population.
Except the Big Five has been debunked as being too lexical for biological differentiation.
Basically its lexical nature introduces perceptual bias that skews any factor analysis for biological structures - i.e. behavior between genders, for example. The way Damore uses it to support his hypothesis wasn't correct.
>And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
Except the Big Five has been debunked as being too lexical for biological differentiation.
Thanks for that. I find that reaction much more informative than the name-calling sent at James Damore.
In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
Well, one should expect that something based on self-report surveys to be about that disconnected from underlying biology. "...lexical perception reflects some elements of it" -- where {it} == {underlying biology}
As per usual, the reality of what goes on inside us is probably more complicated than our mental model of it.
Sure, which may be fine for the burden of proof for a personal opinion.
Incorrectly using evidence to support your opinion as you broadcast it at work, and not listening, discussing, or considering critical feedback (like this) is a different matter. Especially when it means incorrectly classifying your co-workers and trying to change how your work fights social biases.
Incorrectly using evidence to support your opinion as you broadcast it at work
Sorry, but while your observation is interesting, there is nothing incorrect about citing such evidence.
Especially when it means incorrectly classifying your co-workers and trying to change how your work fights social biases.
Exactly how did James Damore go about classifying specific co-workers? [Citation Needed] Seriously, cite James Damore and show how he "classified" anyone in particular.
Sure - The example in context to this thread is right here in Damore's memo:
> Women, on average, have more:
> - Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas...
> - Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness...
> - Neuroticism...
Damore supports this with a link [1] to a Wikipedia article, which immediately says:
> On the scales measured by the Big Five personality traits women consistently report higher Neuroticism, agreeableness, warmth (an extraversion facet)...
Damore incorrectly uses this information to make the broad statement that "Women have..." instead of "Women self-report...". This is incorrectly classifying your women coworkers as being, among other things, more neurotic than their male counterparts.
You may think, "So what?", but this is being used in an argument about how a company fights social biases, and this is incredibly relevant because lexical self-reporting is open to the same biases that are being fought. Damore, intentionally or not, glosses over this, but more importantly was not receptive to this type of feedback, hence the broadcasting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
This is incorrectly classifying your women coworkers as being, among other things, more neurotic than their male counterparts.
Just because there is correlational evidence for the general population, it doesn't automatically follow that any given explictly selected population (such as Google's employee population) follows the stated correlation. Does he say so explicitly, and can you honestly rule out a speculative reading of his memo? I asked you for James Damore citing any particular coworker as having any particular quality. Still, the best you can do is to nitpick words and impute motives.
Also, what's particularly wrong with sensitive, agreeable, and warm people? I'm quite sensitive, though I'm only agreeable and warm in certain contexts. I could see how all of those traits could be of great benefit to developing many of Google's apps. Your implication that those traits are somehow bad also smacks of bias.
Given all the above, it sure seems like I could purport to read between the lines and say that you have some kind of vested interest in a particular reading of his memo, but my doing so would be falling into the very kind of irrational projection I'm self-referentially citing. So am I wrong in making this kind of projection? If I'm wrong for doing that, then it would seem you're wrong for your projections as well. If you say I'm correct about the projection, well, I'll take that just as well.
Do you have evidence to the contrary? Because it seems the part you are projecting is the nitpicking, because it is nitpicking to question if Damore thought this information was relevant to his 23,000 women coworkers in his memo criticizing the hiring policies at Google. If he didn't think it was relevant to the women at work, then why would he even include it in his argument about the hiring policy of his coworkers?
You asked for a citation from Damore's memo, and I provided it. Anything you personally feel or think about yourself is anecdotal evidence and not really relevant. If anything, how you personally feel about this new information (that you requested) can be analyzed for confirmation bias.
> relevant to his 23,000 women coworkers in his memo criticizing the hiring policies at Google. If he didn't think it was relevant to the women at work
Considering the question is about (lack of) representation, it is very much about the women who are not coworkers.
You asked for a citation from Damore's memo, and I provided it.
Its interpretation as evidence for what I asked for is pretty stretched and tortured. Thanks for that!
I think you may have it backwards. I'm not sure if you read his memo, but it was actually Damore who was inviting discussion and listening to feedback. He was not met with anything resembling constructive discussion, but instead was fired and publicly shamed, in most cases based on fabrications of statements that he did not make, and that did not reflect his intent. Even this techcrunch article is full of them unfortunately.
Until the people who dislike what he had to say are willing to have an honest conversation about things he actually did say, progress here is impossible, and further backlash and resentment against minorities is inevitable.
As someone on HN once said, we won't discuss the core of the problem not because what he said is untrue, but because the outcome of discussion may hurt peoples' feelings, and this is not the right thing to do...
I see their point, but there is a way of discussing it in a way that would minimize this risk. On the other hand, if you have some assumptions and consider their negation offensive, it's very difficult to have any form of conversation.
Google's primary business model, is literally to build the worlds best, most gigantic person-classification engine, and classify people with it. To sell shit.
> Except the Big Five has been debunked as being too lexical for biological differentiation.
Has the Big Five model been actually debunked? Or, rather, has it received criticism.
But, yes, your focus on the content of the memo itself is a breath of fresh air in this overall debacle of a discourse.
1. Whether or not the Big Five are appropriate for the analysis or not, or whether they're ultimate truth or not, doesn't really matter for the point I and GP were making: Damon's terminology is jargon from differential psychology and easily misunderstood. ("Women score higher on neuroticism on average" does not mean "Women are too neurotic to work as engineers in big companies", or whatever.)
2. I think it takes more than one article (which has been cited once, by the author themselves) to unseat the Big Five.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/citedby...
3. As an aside, note that the article finds significant sex differences (p=0.00) in 10 out of 12 items on its proposed scale, STQ-150, if I'm understanding it correctly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/table/p...
1. And my point is that even with it's correctly understood, it is still incorrect. I agree that the entire document was overly vague and open to interpreters inserting their own ideas, usually tied to their own political identity.
2. Appealing to number of citations is an appeal to popularity (fallacy) because it avoids criticizing the content. It's also not "unseating" the big five, just demonstrating how the big five is incorrectly used as biological factor analysis. There are other applications is psychoanalysis the big five can be use for.
3. If you read the paper, you'd see that Table 3 is used in conjunction with other data to prove their hypothesis on projection-through-capacity bias.
So your point is that, even though the reporters neglected to explain (or understand) the term neurotic, they were justified because the ultimately correct explanation is that it's meaningless in context?
In that case, the only proper response is to report that the word neurotic is not scientific.
In that case, the only proper response is to report that the word neurotic is not scientific.
I think that's a discussion worth having. That would've been a lot better than just firing the guy!
No, my point is that worrying about the semantics of the word neurotic is a pointless exercise because even when correctly understood in the case of the big five, it's still incorrectly used scientifically by Damore.
But it's disingenuous to the point of the memo, to the point that it's _deliberately_ misleading to the general public... Leading to the moral outrage.
How was it deliberately misused for moral outrage? I thought the context here is that people flat out misunderstood it, not deliberately misused it. In either case, whether by Damore or the public, deliberate or not, it was definitely being misused. Splitting hairs by whom is the pointless exercise.
I agree. It seemed to me that Damore's memo was nevertheless fallacious, though nevertheless totally unworthy of the criticism that he received. Unlike in fields we are used to, psychological results have remarkably little prescriptive power given the inherently complex and malleable nature of social structures, and it's still pretty much up in the air how much or little effect nature has on preferences and to what extent a social arrangement is able to affect/has affected/reinterpreted/transformed those preferences without effecting a change in overall happiness/satisfaction.
It also saddens me that a number of Damore's suggestions to make the workplace more "nurture-trait-friendly" got overshadowed by those dubious extrapolations. It seems interesting and fruitful to me to explore the work dynamics and psychology present in more "nurture" fields and see how well they translate to software development and collaboration.
There is a silver lining to all this for me: it shows that whereas women used to have little voice in the public sphere, "American women" as a class now have a sufficiently loud voice that even its less-well-thought-out ideologies have traction and influence in civil society (along with all that entails, including having possibly self-proclaimed representatives and "thought leaders").
There is a silver lining to all this for me: it shows that whereas women used to have little voice in the public sphere, "American women" as a class now have a sufficiently loud voice
There is nothing good about someone who has a "sufficiently loud voice" -- if that loudness comes not from principle and merit, but from emotional toxicity.
The way I see it is that the feminism movement of old basically won - women voices are being heard and treated as equally important in the society. But like many movements, instead of dissolving after successful accomplishment of its mission, it transformed into a form that tries to perpetuate its own survival and status of importance.
I would disagree with that. Women still face plenty of discrimination in society
This is true. Asians face plenty of prejudicial discrimination as well. I would say that everyone faces some form of it. My mother always says, "Living well is the best revenge."
After awhile, onlookers catch onto the fact one is spending all of their time moving the goalposts.
You’re a hundred percent right. Living well is the best revenge.
Short people, ugly people, fat people, disabled people... The list of discriminated against populations is practically endless and you can’t let it tear you up or drive you crazy if you’re one of them.
You should give an example
"American women" as a class now have a sufficiently loud voice
Why is it important that they have a sufficiently loud voice "as a class?" This seems backwards to me. The whole point of liberation is liberation to be treated as an individual not as a member of a class based on something contextually irrelevant like your biological sex.
I agree that it is backwards, but it's heavily ingrained in US politics that decisions revolve around classes. Politicians make decisions thinking about which class they will benefit, which class (and their representatives) they will receive support from, etc.
Empowering the individual is a noble goal, but that is a separate battle with a different front.
I agree that it is backwards, but it's heavily ingrained in US politics that decisions revolve around classes
I think it's made to seem that way by media coverage and political propaganda(especially from the left) more than it actually is. The problem is that it's easy to analyze something by arbitrary groups but in doing so often if not usually miss things (indeed this was one of Damore's key themes in his original essay).
The rhetoric may be actualizing, but I still think it's more a case of bad analytical generalizations than actual decision-making. Although, it's getting worse, as the whole drama with Jordan Peterson last year over pronouns demonstrated. At the core of his concern seemed to be he growing number of increasingly narrow and increasingly arbitrary suspect class definitions (or whatever they call it in Canada).
The original concept of a suspect class in the US was codified to serve as a legal guidelines for determining whether discrimination had taken place. The idea was to balance the ideal of democratic freedom to enact laws with the political reality that some clearly identified recognized groups (mainly Black Americans) had not been allowed to participate in the democratic process that produced the laws under which they had to conform. Many of those laws were shown to be prima facie discriminatory and evidence suggested plenty more were intended to be discriminatory in practice. And by virtue of minority status, they'd be unable to effectively challenge those discriminatory laws through democratic means. Women classified as a quasi-suspect class by virtue of historical disenfranchisement, despite their not being a minority.
But, it has been at least century since women were granted the right to vote. "Women as a class" have been one of the strongest political factions in the United States for decades. Roe v. Wade was 1973, a decade before any Millenial was even born. Pandering to women is pervasive in US politics on both sides.
The narrative that women had no voice, political will, or influence until Last Thursday is persistent and massive historical revisionism.
Just because a media outlet might have been aggressively attacked his memo, doesn't mean his arguments are valid. He cherry picked various pieces and came to conclusions that weren't causal. At the end of the day, his perception of what is happening at Google is just that, perception.
My guess is that he will be settled with to avoid the annoyance or simply destroyed in court.
> Just because a media outlet might have been aggressively attacked his memo, doesn't mean his arguments are valid.
Many media outlets aggressively attacked his memo, but the argument isn't "his arguments are validated because outlets attacked his memo"; it's that the response to his memo was malicious and slanderous, and this is wrong even if his arguments are bad. Bad arguments should be met with good arguments, not hate and slander.
The topic matter was above the IQ of the vast majority of the protesters so we got a mob rule, peasant like response.
Did James Damore ever claim that women overall have lower IQs than men overall? [Citation Needed]
You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative.
Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.
It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence?
Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.
Yes.
In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them.
Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
I meant for my question to be directed specifically towards the person making the claim about her specific coworkers at a specific company. This company has hiring practices that are not necessarily reflected across all of corporate America, and the claims being made are about those specific hiring practices and the effects that they have.
From what little the OP has said about her company I am willing to take a wild guess that she does indeed work for a large coproration (lip service paid to diversity, incompetent people hired to demonstrate it)- where you can expect this sort of thing to be very common.
I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place.
So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.
In a way that was my point, I just wasn't really good at relaying it. Of course there are many incompetent male engineers but it's more noticeable when they are a "diversity hire".
I don't present my situation as anything more than anecdotal, it's just what I've noticed. And to answer your question no the manager does not treat male developers the same way, they're held to a higher standard. In fact the "middle-aged white male" has to be above average at this particular company to be kept on.
> she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries
I'd wager a third of the nodejs "developer community" could be described that way. The key thing is was she hired to write sql queries?
Yes, that is part of her job, but it wasn't covered in the interview process from what I've been told.
I've worked with plenty of tech and related people who didn't understand basic technologies we expect in a given field.
I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.
If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.
I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - on her last day after several years of working in the org and ask me what her email address is.
Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.
Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.
Unfortunately, they tend to be promoted quickly. For being so brilliant, you understand.
And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.
Does she even bother looking at the docs or would that also denote how useless she is?
Well, she is learning it now and I wouldn't call her "useless". But her level of experience and knowledge is far below "software engineer" and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it.
you'd be surprised. i worked with people who would write simple json structures by creating a class in java and then serializing it and printing it to the console to copy and paste. most of them were promoted out to management
Actually, there is a certain wisdom to promoting incompetent people in this manner. At least then you know that they're nowhere near anything they can use to do real lasting damage.
> they're nowhere near anything they can use to do real lasting damage
Except, make 'technical management' decisions like "we should use mongodb because it's web-scale".
> and if she were a guy she couldn't get away with it
I think this is untrue. I know a lot of male "sofware engineers" who are totally incompetent and remain well employed.
Presumably the OP meant "remain in that role in the company"; not necessarily intending to extrapolate to all positions at all companies.
The best C++ programmer (someone who does real magic in the machine) I know has said that they can't think in SQL. Different people have different skills and mindsets.
Strikes me as a distinction without a difference -- incompetence means you are incapable of performing a task.
One could speak of someone having more skill than another, but if both skillsets have no value, it doesn't really matter.
>> It depends on whether the incompetent male engineers are just as incompetent as the incompetent female engineers. For instance, she mentioned a female developer who couldn't write SQL queries. Are the incompetent male developers at that same level of incompetence?
Oh yes. Especially if you work in, say, a big financial corporation- the kind of large, monolithic organisation that isn't a technology company, per se, but uses technology (as only a large monolith would). In that kind of place, you can expect the majority of "technical" employees to be largely uninterested in, and therefore fairly clueless about, technology (i.e. they're just in it to jump over to tech management roles down the line). So, software engineers who can't write SQL queries are a thing. A common, inescepable fact of life, indeed.
I would not like to say whether I'm speaking of personal experience with such organisations. It wouldn't be proper.
This can definitely be the case. There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry.
I have met plenty of white men who have masters level CS education, have worked for Google and other top name companies, and can't produce a line of useful working code to save their lives.
The reasons why corporations frequently hire people who don't actually produce anything are varied and complex, but it happens, a lot.
If someone is incompetent and also happens to be from a minority group then everyone starts complaining about how they are a "diversity hire" but with incompetent white males they just shrug and go "that's the way it is." In other words, it is so common with white males that no one even notices.
>If someone is incompetent and also happens to be from a minority group then everyone starts complaining about how they are a "diversity hire" but with incompetent white males they just shrug and go "that's the way it is." In other words, it is so common with white males that no one even notices.
You could be right this is definitely a possibility. I did not intend to suggest that all white male programmers are awesome, certainly not the case.
And I'd add that there's evidence (and plenty of anecdote) that the men who most object to diversity are not so good at what they do. Which makes sense; they are the ones who have the most to lose from an increased talent pool. [1]
Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming.
[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...
[2] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-dam...
From the complaint:
"23. Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year.
24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google.
25. Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google."
Sounds like he was pretty good, but I wonder about this part:
> Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance
How are these ratings done, by the team/manager or externally? IME when it's done by the same team then reviews are more about politics than performance.
so let me get this staright: when Damore is being rated politics have an effect on ratings and promotions
when Damore speaks out against politics affecting hiring and promotion, he is wrong
I'm fascinated how one can reconcile both beliefs
Sorry that was terribly worded, I meant politics/political in the personal sense, who's friends with who, etc.
Yes, I'm sure Damore claims he was excellent. But claims of excellence do not correlate perfectly with actual excellence. And neither do promotion packets; I'm sure we've all worked with somebody who did better on paper than was justified.
So I'd still like to see his code. And talk with some of his coworkers.
You're just mining for something by now. It is clear that you implication that Damore was a sore loser that covered his lack of performance by blaming diversity has no connection to reality. Damore had performance completely satisfactory by Google's standards, and achieved significant praise from his peers, so whatever would be your evaluation of it, he was not in a loser position, had no reason to be sore for anything and had no reason to blame diversity for anything related to performance or its perception by others. Time to leave this horse, it's dead.
The guy appears to have lied about a PhD and being a chess master. So it's entirely reasonable for me to be skeptical of his claims in a lawsuit that he was an A+++ top performer. And even if those claims are correct, I still would like to look at his code and hear from his coworkers. He wouldn't be the first person to get promoted beyond his actual accomplishments.
Also, sweeping assertions like "had no reason" assume facts not in evidence. We mainly don't know what happened at Google. Or why he didn't complete his PhD. We have only heard his side of the story, and only part of that.
It's OK to be skeptical. But when evidence is presented that it's not the case, and you are doubling down by denying it, it's not being skeptical anymore. It's refusing to accept the facts since they don't fit your preconceptions.
> We mainly don't know what happened at Google.
We don't, beyond public evidence (including one in the lawsuit and outside). But that evidence we do have, and it does not align with your presumption that Damore was poor performer, unless you accept a completely invented premise that all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews and performance evaluations, but he was still unhappy and decided to push the diversity angle to achieve... I don't know what, getting fired from a job where everybody, according to you, were going out of the way to make him happy? I don't think this is a workable hypothesis, and certainly not one that bears minimal skeptical scrutiny.
You can't be called "skeptical" if you only mistrust evidence which does not fit your preconception, but accept and even invent one that fits one. That's not skepticism, that's agenda.
I am not presuming he is a poor performer. I am saying that the quality of his performance is open to question, and I would like to evaluate it for myself. It could be good, and I would not be surprised, as most people hired at Google are pretty sharp. It could also be bad and I wouldn't be surprised, for the reasons mentioned.
> all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews and performance evaluations.
Oh, do you have copies of those? I would like to see them, too thanks. Otherwise, you don't have much in the way of evidence that those exist. You have a proven liar about performance making claims about performance. He could be correct in this case, or he could be lying again.
> all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews
Have you ever been part of a performance review process? Even the best-designed ones are imperfect and political. Sometimes not-very-good people get promoted. Sometimes very good people don't. I have heard a number of stories from Google pals of people energetically trying to manipulate the process.
When it's my job to read performance reviews and promotion packets, I take them with a grain of salt. I look at work output and actually talk with people. Which is all I'm saying I'd like to do here. Maybe Damore really is competent. Maybe he isn't. I'd like to see for myself.
> We already know that he lied about a PhD
No, he did not lie about this. You are lying about it. His linkedin listed him as having been part of a PhD program and people took it to mean he had a PhD. There is absolutely no evidence he ever intended to mislead anyone about this.
So, please stop spreading lies.
PS I know because I actually saw the linkedin profile before he edited it. It did not say he had a PhD. It clearly listed that he was in the program for 2 years, which any person reasonably familiar with PhD programs would immediately suspect meant that he had not finished. And indeed, I followed up by looking up what publications he had, and while his name was on a couple of papers he had clearly not published a dissertation. So, to anyone who wasn't deliberately looking to discredit him for malicious or self-interested reasons, as Business Insider's Natasha Tiku almost certainly was, would not have been fooled for a second by his profile nor would they have believed that Damore intended to fool them.====Note the business insider article you linked uses these weasel words:
James Damore, the fired Google engineer who wrote the now-infamous memo on diversity at the company, has removed mention of PhD studies in biology from his LinkedIn profile.
The removal comes after Wired writer Nitasha Tiku confirmed with Harvard that Damore has not completed his PhD.
He then goes on to call out the "Right-wing argument" appealing to his credibility because he had a PhD.
If you read carefully, you'll see that they frame as if it was this embarassing thing that they'd shamed him into doing, to encourage lazy, non-critical readers to reach the same conclusion that you did, while using the technically correct words to avoid defamation liability. But, careful analysis of the facts shows that I am correct. He did not lie about the PhD, others either lied on his behalf without his knowledge; or were confused by careless/overly-optimistic reading of the LinkedIn profile.
I saw the LinkedIn profile too; I looked him up when the story first broke. I saw it and said, "Damn, a PhD in systems biology, he should know better than this." People who don't finish their PhDs either a) don't list the PhD, just leaving it as a Master's, or b) are explicit that they don't have the PhD. (E.g., "ABD in Systems Biology.)
So at the very best, his resume was misleading because he was incompetent at putting together a resume. That doesn't jibe with the theory that he's so very brilliant. The fact that he quickly edited it when called out confirms even he saw it as misleading; that he didn't comment or apologize suggests it was not a simple mistake.
Ah, and now that I go look for images, it did not list him as being part of a PhD *program". it just said "PhD, Systems Biology" under education:
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/598b0f3776084a30198...
I'm glad to hear you weren't misled by that thanks to your expertise, but there's no denying that is misleading to a general-audience reader.
So your argument goes like this:
1. Damore truthfully specified he's a PhD student
2. You (I assume innocently) and others (some innocently, some maliciously) misconstrued this as a claim that he has a PhD degree
3. Despite Linkedin information being completely true and whole error being contained in your bad reading alone, you and others called Damore a liar.
4. Damore removed that true information to avoid further confusion
5. You construe it as a proof that Damore was a liar, since if he removed completely truthful information that some people misread and used it against him, he must have intended to mislead from the start, and that's why he specified his PhD student status exactly as it truly was.
6. This also proves Damore was incompetent, since he wrote his Linkedin page in a way that a hostile or inattentive reader was able to misunderstand his page where it suited his preexisting notions, which would never happen if Damore was any good at writing Linkedin pages, as it is known that well-written (or merely competently written) Linkedin page is impossible to misread or misinterpret, no matter how much you try.
7. This is further proven by the image, since Linkedin design and forms do not allow to distinguish incomplete PhD study in progress from a finished one and display merely a length of the study but not the completion status, clearly Damore intended to mislead by using the only options available in the Linkedin interface.
This sounds like extremely tortured logic aimed at arriving at predetermined conclusion that Damore is a bad person. Looks like you're continuing to mine for something that explains why Damore is a bad person (failing at the premise he's a bad programmer above), to avoid addressing what he said on merits - since if he's a bad person, he can't be right on merits, obviously, no bad person has ever said anything true.
Note, you don't have to address it if you don't want to, but if you do, personal attack is not the best way to go, even if a very common one.
That is not my argument.
My argument is that if in LinkedIn's education section you list a school and a degree -- which he did -- people take that to mean you have the degree. Ergo, he falsely claimed to have a degree he didn't.
Could that be an accident? Might it just be incompetence? Maybe. But given that he also falsely claimed on his resume to be a chess master, I think the simple explanation is that he lied about both.
That he then quickly removed things when called out with neither explanation nor apology fits in with the "lies to make himself look good" narrative. A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.
Your thing about LinkedIn form design seems to be pure fiction. I just checked: you can enter any text you like, including no text at all. People without a degree don't have to put a degree in. I spent an entire 3 minutes looking at examples, and people fill in all sorts of things, including "PhD Candidate" and "PhD Student (incomplete)" to make it clear they are not claiming the degree.
This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.
That's what he did! That is, that's what he did when someone finally got around to asking him about it in an environment where he trusted that he'd be given time to say his side in an unedited manner, which does not include any of the hit pieces you have linked. I believe it's mentioned in his interview with Jordan Peterson, which is the first public interview he gave.
Again you are blaming him for your own error.
This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
First, it is absolutely a personal attack. You're attacking his character and coding ability, which are not relevant to the topic. Ok, technically, you're passively suggesting it via speculative commentary but it amounts to the same thing.
Second, your inferences aren't reasonable, and they're unreasonable in exactly the manner that one would predict based on consumption of inflammatory and deliberately misleading propaganda aimed primarily at smearing Damore. For example, you inferred that he "didn't say anything or apologize," apparently relying on entirely on hostile bloggers to convey that message to you on his behalf. Remember that until this blew up, he was a private individual. He has no platform of his own and no way to offer any response that your chosen sources did not provide to you. So it is completely and utterly unreasonable to hold him accountable in such a way.
Furthermore, the fixation with LinkedIn is unreasonable. LinkedIn profiles are notoriously unreliable and many are neglected and incomplete, since many members are not actively seeking employment (yet retain membership for the social networking). If you had looked at Damore's whole profile rather than just the image, it was clear that not much effort had been put into it. This is consistent with his story that he had not been actively seeking employment when Google offered him an interview based on his Chess playing.
Which brings us to the chess issue. And yes, it seems that Damore stated on his resume that he's a FIDE Master, a term of art that it seems clear that he misused. Specifically he wrote "FIDE Master in Chess (>99th Percentile)". Other claims about chess-playing on his resume seem to check out as far as I can tell[0][1]. So yes, it's an interesting question why does he say that on his resume. I have not found an explanation, but can certainly think of others not mentioned in that stackexchange link, such as he misunderstood proper use of the term. Obviously a mistake, one that shouldn't be made, but nothing like the dishonesty you're accusing him of, especially when you give him no opportunity to explain himself.
Meanwhile, in this obsession with minor errors in an inexperienced young person's first resume or linkedin profile(errors that are easily cleared-up in a phone interview if you actually care), you are apparently giving a pass to someone who anonymously leaked a co-workers' fair and well-reasoned internal posting to outrage media to encourage hit pieces and start a witch hunt. ... which ultimately resulted in the employer being hit with a ton of negative press and a high-profile lawsuit.
So, no, your inferences are not remotely reasonable or appropriate by my estimation.
[0] http://www.uschess.org/results/2003/nya/?page=WINNERS&xsecti...
[1] I don't know what "Board 1 and Conference Champion" means, and "Rise of Nations" is a PC strategy game.
I look forward to you pointing out his actual apology to me. I've read a fair bit about Damore and haven't seen it. Your notion that he didn't have a platform is just bizarre. Anybody who works at Google should know that it's not hard to publish things on the Internet. It takes all of 90 seconds to get a Twitter account, and not much longer to set up a blog. He could have also put a note on his LinkedIn profile.
I made no error in parsing his LinkedIn. He may have made an error in writing it, but the common interpretation for what he wrote is that he was claiming a PhD.
I'm glad you finally admit he did the same thing on his resume. Again, there could be an innocent explanation for it, but the reasonable inference is that he said what he meant. If he would like to correct the record on this topic, he's welcome to publish something explaining.
His character and coding ability are both relevant to the topics at hand, his advocacy and subsequent lawsuit lawsuit. The former speaks to his reliability; both speak to motivation. As does, now that you mention it, the fact that the interviews he gave were to right-wing antifeminists.
I also think it's hilarious that when talking about his apparent resume fraud, he's a delicate "inexperienced young person", but when coding and opining on diversity programs he's a brilliant genius who has never done a thing wrong. You're straining at gnats and swallowing camels here.
I just wanted to respond and say how interesting your final claim is, that his fair and reasonable internal posting was leaked to outrage media.
The irony is that in the lawsuit damore filed, he outright names a bunch of people who work at Google and have said various levels of innocent comments. He's leaked out internal information to outrage media in order to punish and start a witch hunt. I've already seen combinations of images containing information about said named employees float around the more witch hunt-y side of the internet.
You need proof to file a lawsuit. A lot of it, especially if you claim must prove a pattern of behavior that is pervasive. If he didn't specify it, you'd say "well, there are no evidence of any specific behavior, only nebulous allegations, and we all know Damore is a liar, so he probably invented all this to justify his poor performance and hate for women". People say it anyway, but now know it's not true, because there is evidence.
Also, there's a bit of difference between "Let's discuss whether diversity is done right in Google" and "I will keep hounding you until one of us fired. Fuck you" (real quote), "We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you." (again real quote), "We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses" (trying to make your opponents unemployable), “You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” and, of course, "How do you let people know you don’t take their ideas seriously? … No-platforming fascists does scale. So does punching one on camera." and "Get in touch with your friendly local antifa" - this one is especially juicy as a lot of people insanely called what Damore did "violence" but then turn around and literally endorse actual physical violence.
You manage to selectively quote the worst offenders in the filing while also ignoring the more benign comments (incl. one that called out Breitbart as being pro-Nazi, which I would hope you would agree that they are trash).
You also ignore the selective censorship of usernames going on, when he could've censored all the names to ignore igniting any potential witch hunts. Can you provide an explanation for this? He could've shown the pattern without putting other people at risk.
> My argument is that if in LinkedIn's education section you list a school and a degree -- which he did -- people take that to mean you have the degree. Ergo, he falsely claimed to have a degree he didn't
People that read that are wrong (at least sometimes), since Linkedin shows degrees-in-progress and completed degrees the same way. Not ideal interface, for sure, but that's what it is. People that do not know that make mistakes. It's their mistake.
> Could that be an accident? Might it just be incompetence? Maybe.
Surely, it may be incompetence - not understanding how Linkedin profile works. But it's not Damore's incompetence.
> That he then quickly removed things when called out with neither explanation nor apology
If people misunderstood what was on his Linkedin page, and undeservedly called him a liar and attacked him for that, and he removed the controversial item despite it being true - I think demanding apology from him for you misunderstanding him and falsely calling him a liar is taking the entitlement thing too far. If somebody owes an apology, it's people who called him a liar despite him publishing completely true information - but of course I do not hold by breath for that.
> fits in with the "lies to make himself look good" narrative.
Surely it fits your narrative. The problem is it is not true.
> A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.
Nobody owes you feeling bad for telling the truth and you misunderstanding him. It would be nice if people who did the misunderstanding felt bad and did not blame others for their mistake, but I recognize this is not how the Internet works. If you misunderstood something, it's other guy who should be feeling bad for not working harder to prevent any chance of you making a mistake. The other guy is always responsible, he's clearly either a liar or an idiot for letting you to misunderstand him.
> Your thing about LinkedIn form design seems to be pure fiction. I just checked: you can enter any text you like, including no text at all.
That misunderstanding thing happened to you again. I haven't said you cannot enter free text in Linkedin. I said the form does not have completion status for education. Yes, you can hack around that by adding various text to a degree program name or any other field. If Damore knew in advance there would be a mob of hostile attackers scrutinizing everything he ever did under a microscope to find even a tiniest flaw and blow it up out of proportion, he would probably do it too. But he just wrote true facts about his educational record, without thinking about being extra defensive and using tools given to him by Linkedin. Linkedin provides tools to set beginning and end time for educational record, and program name, but does not have a setting for "incomplete" or "in progress" status.
> This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
You "reasonable inferences" - which, as far as blaming others for your misunderstanding goes are not reasonable at all - are what is the personal attack, since they seek to impugn Damore's character without addressing his actual arguments. That's the definition of personal attack.
No, LinkedIn does not "shows degrees-in-progress and completed degrees the same way". LinkedIn lets you type what you want. And in the examples I've looked at, most people are very clear about how it turned out. If they are in a PhD program, they say so. If they left with a Master's, as Damore did, they either claim the Master's or are explicit that they didn't finish the PhD.
That is exactly what people do on paper resumes, which also let you type what you want. Why? Because falsely claiming (or even giving the impression of claiming) an academic degree is a giant no-no. People get fired for that.
You repeatedly ignore that he also falsely claimed to be a chess master. Is your theory there that it was also just an accident, forced by software? That the word processor somehow made him put "FIDE Master in Chess (>99th Percentile)" and that he as a computer expert just couldn't figure out any other way to use the tool?
I'm not the one fitting a narrative here, pal. I see your DARVO.
People get fired for that.
I call bullshit. Show me three examples of people "getting fired for giving the impression of claiming they had a PhD on LinkedIn" when there's a plausible case to be made that it was an innocent mistake with at least equal blame on the reader.
I just looked at my LinkedIn profile, which I haven't updated in at least 2 or 3 years, probably more. For reasons I don't know, it lists two entries for my education.
I do have two BA degrees that I earned concurrently. I really have no idea why it shows one entry with both degrees and one entry with a single degree. Did the LinkedIn database change at some point in the last 15 years? Did I really fill out the degree fields redundantly?[UNIVERSITY XYZ] Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science, [Second Major] [YEAR] - [YEAR + 4] [UNIVERSITY XYZ] Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science [YEAR] - [YEAR + 4]Damned if I know. Did I intend for it to be confusing? Certainly not, I'm sure I just filled out the forms with what I thought the program could work with and would make sense. Maybe I used some Wizard-style Q&A format that they don't use anymore. I really have no clue at all. But there it is, ready for someone to screencap and use to embarrass me if they wanted to, mocking my apparent inability to create a properly formatted LinkedIn profile.
I also note that there's nothing filled in for "description" or "activities" or anything like that. When I was young and did not have much of a resume of relevant accomplishments in my work history, I often included, on my paper resume, an honor society membership and an elected treasurer position I'd held for two semesters in a student group. These seem like details I would have added to LinkedIn, had the interface had a section for it(as it does now). But there isn't anything there. Did I remove them? Did I just never bother to add them? Or was the "activities, etc." field added to the schema after I created my profile? Certainly, the javascript-based interactive editor available now, was not the editor I used when I originally created my profile.
What I do know is that I've never directed anyone to my LinkedIn profile. I've never encouraged an employer to review it and the only interactions I've had come from former co-workers and recruiters. At this point I consider it more of a professional obligation than anything else, and log in every so often mostly to check messages and update endorsements.
I also know that I've seen work histories that look really weird, often when people work in multiple positions at the same company for years but that company also changes ownership multiple times. So you have a bizarrely fragmented presentation of a story I know to be fairly simple. Something like "was hired entry-level, switched departments, got promoted, and is now Senior Account Manager for Whatever domain" winds up looking like a career with 5 different positions on 4 different teams in 3 different companies. I consider that to be a decent indication that many people either don't spend a lot of time on their profiles, or else find the interface cumbersome enough that they're unwilling to deal with it long enough to convey a real resume-style work history.
People get fired for resume fraud all the time: https://www.google.com/search?q=fired+for+resume+fraud&tbm=n...
There is no plausible claim that the reader is to blame here. If you show his entry, sans name, to 100 people asking them what degrees he claims, I'd be that at least 90 would say he had a PhD and a BS. Just as people looking at his current LinkedIn profile would understand he now claims an MS.
> No, LinkedIn does not "shows degrees-in-progress and completed degrees the same way".
It does.
> LinkedIn lets you type what you want.
It also does, it doesn't contradict the previous sentence. As I said, Linked in does not have data item for degree being complete or not (I am not sure how familiar you are with data modeling, but situation of having a model for some property and deriving it from ad-hoc texts in unrelated data items are very different). Some people do extra work by using degree name or other fields to work around this, some don't bother. Neither are liars.
> That is exactly what people do on paper resumes, which also let you type what you want.
No, that's a very different case. Paper resume is completely freeform. Linkedin has set of forms, some of which are free text, which you can use - if you want to - to cover for shortcomings in other places, like use degree or program name to express completion status. Some don't bother to because they think it's be clear from context. Sometimes it is not. It happens. It'd be good to recognize that.
> Because falsely claiming (or even giving the impression of claiming) an academic degree is a giant no-no. People get fired for that.
People get fired for all kinds of things, like expressing unpopular opinion, as it turns out. But there's world of difference between claiming the degree on resume (which didn't happen) and somebody misreading ambiguous output of a site.
> You repeatedly ignore that he also falsely claimed to be a chess master.
Why I should address this unrelated claim before we address the one at point? If you admit you were wrong on the Linkedin part - and recognize the fact both claims are personal attacks, since they have little to do with the claims Damore is making or you were making - we can consider the chess thing. Before that it's just a distraction - what about this? what about that? what about that third thing? forget that I didn't prove the first two, what about the fourth thing? Nope, won't work this way. You have to substantiate every one of your claims, not just bring a new one once previous one was questioned.
> I see your DARVO.
You are implying that you're somehow a victim here? Nice one. So far you are the one denying the facts (as in, ones about Damore's performance) and personally attacking him (as in, bringing irrelevant claims about his character to discussion about his factual claims), and of course claiming that somebody here is "offender", without any proof of offense made - unless you consider you misunderstanding Damore's Linkedin profile as "offense" to you and you being "victim"? That'd be rich. The fact that you have a nice acronym in your pocket doesn't change any of that.
The claims of "falsely claimed a PhD on LinkedIn" and "falsely claimed to be a chess master on his resume" are not "unrelated". They are closely related examples of the same behavior. If he's a liar on his resume (and he is), it is much easier to believe that he's a liar on LinkedIn.
Spare me the condescension on data modeling. LinkedIn barely has a data model; it is a modestly structured version of a resume, with a bunch of free text fields. It is not a "very different case". People will often ask for "a resume or a LinkedIn link" in job applications because they serve the same purpose. LinkedIn will automatically render your LinkedIn profile in resume form. They are in practice the same.
And in either case, if you say "PhD, Systems Biology, Harvard" in the education section, reasonable people will believe you claim to have a PhD. That's how I read it. That's how many people read it. And if you did a user test, I'm sure that's how most people would read it. That anonymous Damore fanboys now claim they'd read it differently is not proof of anything about the wider world.
You can claim that it was a mistake on his part (and others have), or that his documented social ineptitude (as his fellow students talked about) mean that he just didn't understand the social implications of what he wrote. But then you would have to grapple with the other lie on his resume, which is why you are spinning so vigorously away from it.
I am not denying any "facts" about Damore's performance. I agree he worked at Google and didn't get fired for a while. I agree that he claims his performance was great. Those are facts. As I said at the beginning of this thread, I'd like to see that for myself. People who lie on resumes are not trustworthy sources for their job performance.
Yeah that's another point. It's a category error to apply interpersonal social expectations to a "man vs media+internet mob" scenario.
When you mislead an individual in real life and that person suffers actual consequences from that mistake, apology and forgiveness help repair the relationship.
A media hack writing about this has not suffered a real interpersonal offense over the issue, nor have any of the self-righteous audience passing judgment. As these people have not suffered any actual harm they are not owed an apology, nor would an apology given under such circumstances function as it is supposed to. There is no interpersonal relationship to repair in the first place.
He published his resume to the world on LinkedIn. I suppose he could try to track every reader down individually, but that seems like quite a challenge. Which is why published errors usually are followed by published corrections with explanation and/or apology. Even media hacks do it, so presumably Damore could manage.
He did not invite the entire world to look at that LinkedIn profile for any material reason. You're playing fast and loose with the term "published" and holding Damore to absurd standards that you obviously do not even adhere to yourself. If you held yourself to the same standard you held Damore, you would not have published the reckless, incredibly unprofessional, and possibly even defamatory comments about his coding ability. When called out on it you would have apologized and maybe done some soul-searching about why you felt so comfortable engaging in such careless slander of a young engineer you have never met and know almost nothing about.
What comments about his coding ability do you claim are slanderous? I said I wanted to see his code, and would not be shocked that it's not very good. I stand by that. Maybe it's good, maybe it isn't.
Anyhow, publishing something on the web invites anybody to look at it whenever they please. Putting a profile on a site specifically made for people to evaluate your professional standing is very much inviting people to look at it when they want to know who you are. That is literally the purpose of LinkedIn.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disingenuous
S: There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry.
wpietri: Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming.
You brought up Damore after the parent mentioned "shitty white male programmers". You speculated that you'd expect to discover that he was a bad programmer.
I'd like to see what wpietri's home life looks like. Based on his comments in this thread, I would not be surprised to discover that he's a terrible parent and has a bad relationship with his children.
Would you not find that a completely offensive and uncalled for personal attack? But I didn't lie! It wasn't an attack! It's not technically slander or libel or defamation, and technically is what matters. I just stated what I wanted to see and speculated based on some reasonable inferences. Oh, you don't think my inferences are reasonable? Prove it.
Your analogy is poorly done, I'm sorry to say. Feel free to try again.
But no, I wouldn't think it offensive if it were relevant to the topic at hand. Which it isn't in your imaginary version. And if you're upset about the "shitty white male programmers thing", take it up with the person who wrote it, but it wasn't me. I just said I wanted to see his code so I could see what kind of programmer he is.
Regardless, if that's the best you have, I think we can conclude I said nothing that is either slander or defamation. You accusing me of doing so, ironically, appears to be defamation. I look forward to the effusive apology you apparently believe due in such situations.
> But no, I wouldn't think it offensive if it were relevant to the topic at hand. Which it isn't in your imaginary version
None of your criticism of Damore was relevant. You just jumped on a bandwagon of hate. You picked up a pitchfork and joined a witch hunt. Gaston held up a picture of The Beast and told him he was coming in the night to get your children, and you joined the mindless mob.
I know that I will not be able to convince you now, because your mind is stubbornly closed. Your ego is too sensitive to admit that you have no valid justification for your denigration of Damore. All I hope is that someday, you'll be able to recognize a witch hunt for what it is and resist the urge be swept up in the pathetic, cowardly, petty hate-mongering.
>You claim that there is a pattern of bad diversity hires, but your anecdotes are just as easily explained by confirmation bias: You see an incompetent male engineer, and you write him off as an idiot and forget him. You see an incompetent woman, and she becomes evidence that there is a problem with diversity programs. You remember evidence that supports your narrative.
If you just base it on what you see, yes. But if you're partial to top brass interviews and conversations about getting this or that person to pad diversity, and of talk about overlooking skills since "we need more X", then no (of course that would still be partial knowledge of the overall state of the market).
Googles hiring process has had books written on it. People study for it. When you see someone there that is incompetent you are going to ask why they got through. Diversity hire is one obvious possibility.
> you write him off as an idiot and forget him
Not really. I have a lot of faith in our engineering staff so I wonder how he got hired and how he avoids getting fired. The uncomfortable truth is that if he was an employee that "looked good" I would know the answer to those questions.
As I said before, my response is not data, I know that. But what you just wrote is exactly how confirmation bias works: If he fit your narrative, he would confirm your narrative. That is why these discussions need to be about data, and not "what everyone sees and no one talks about."
My point is more that the anecdotal stuff matters -- by being ham-fisted in your attempts to address diversity you reduce inclusiveness.
Your faith in your engineering staff is beside the point. Bias is human nature. Unless you're actively structuring your processes to exclude or minimise it then you're certainly suffering from it, the only question is how.
It's not specifically gender or racial bias either. We ran a study of 700 candidates for a role, running regular hiring against blind assessment and found that the major difference for that role in that organisation was socio-economic... they'd been excluding great candidates who went to less prestigious universities.
Diversity based on outward appearance is one of the most convoluted and ridiculous movements ever. We cannot spend decades trying to show that appearance is absolutely meaningless to talent, skills, and motivation, and then regress right back to it to show off "diversity".
Also nobody ever seems to ask: diversity of what exactly? What's the target? Life experience? There is no qualitative score for that, nor is any single person's life more or less interesting and influential than anyone else.
The only thing we can objectively and accurately measure is merit, motivation, and results, and we should use those metrics alone for hiring and advancement, in addition to fighting subjective bias (like removing names and photos from resumes) and making sure there's equivalent opportunity for anyone to try. After that, it would be best if just let people do what they want to do and move on.
I think many companies aren’t promoting “diversity” to support an ideology, they do it because it has specific PR and legal outcomes that help their image. Companies with high diversity metrics get praised in the press. Companies with low diversity metrics get negative attention. Diversity metrics are also a solid defense in real courts and the court of public opinion when race/gender/sexual harassment claims come up.
I don’t know to what extent this is true, or even how to measure it, but it would help explain why “diversity” initiatives seems so illogical some times, which has perplexed me too.
That seems to me like an idealogy of its own, but what exactly are diversity metrics measuring then? Appearance and other unchangeable physical traits? How unfortunate since they have nothing to do with interests, abilities, or character.
Yes.
> Appearance and other unchangeable physical traits? How unfortunate since they have nothing to do with interests, abilities, or character.
As GP pointed out, companies aren't really after that.
When a company does not discriminate on race or gender, it generally stays silent about it, because "not actively discriminating" is just normal hiring on merit. When a company boasts about their diversity program, there's a strategy behind it. Maybe it's because the management believes increasing diversity beyond the industry distribution creates a better working environment (as you indirectly point out, the connection here is speculative). Or maybe they know it's good PR, and also a diverse workplace creates a nice CYA for the company in case of a disgruntled employee filing in a bullshit harassment lawsuit.
> but what exactly are diversity metrics measuring then?
Perhaps a willingness to have a dialogue
Much like how when debating the advocacy for a higher education degree I have heard people defend the effort as evidence to accept direction and a capacity to see something through to the end
I think there is merit in what of my own opinion I recognise in your commenting critically of diversity efforts
gp> Diversity based on outward appearance is one of the most convoluted and ridiculous movements ever.
Namely, that you think people should be met with openness and that contemporary diversity efforts seem to restrict that openness
But I feel that is using individual logic on systems
I think the proponents of diversity efforts would most likely support individual openness as well because they also recognise the systemic structures that currently restrict that openness
Like how a degree implies broad connotation about your ability to be a professional in a field when only representing a fraction of what real experience you will utilise in that profession
These diversity efforts seem to be implying generalised correlation to identify inequalities that are restricting universal openness and modifying their behaviour to remove the identifier
Or perhaps they are showing they are willing to use legal measures if exclusive minds refuse to recognise the data supporting "The only thing we can objectively and accurately measure"
I think you're missing the point of the "diversity movement". The point is that some classes, e.g. women and minorities face discrimination that's baked into the selection process, even when they eventual selectors are not showing a preference. You might try to hire based only on "merit, motivation, and results", but any measure of those things is going to be imperfect. If those measurements are themselves biased, then your selection will be biased, even if you didn't want it to be. The goal of diversity policies is, in part, to break through and counteract those biases.
Jon Stewart gave a post-retirement interview in which he talked about this issue in the comedy world. He initially wrote off criticism of the lack of diversity in the writer's room for The Daily Show, since he always told people that he was interested in hiring more women and minorities. He eventually realized that the channels along which people came to the job was already selecting for white males, and that more diverse hiring required rethinking those channels.
I didn't miss that point, it was clearly stated as fighting subjective bias and making sure there is equal opportunity. Measuring performance is pretty objective, but yes it should also constantly be improved.
That has nothing to do with diversity based on appearance nor will those policies help.
Which policies don't help? There have been a broad array of diversity policies attempted over the years. Do you have any evidence suggesting that they all fail?
Here's [1] an overview of a bunch of programs. It includes data on how they've affected employee composition and discusses why certain things fail or succeed. The first success it cites is voluntary diversity training. The sort Google has. The sort that James Damore attended and then got angry about.
Policies to force diversity based on outward appearance and other unchangeable and meaningless physical traits do not help.
As said before: remove any selection bias, then hire those who can do the work, want to do the work, and have shown to do the work well before. Then measure performance and promote using the same objective processes. That's it.
Perhaps we can boil down the issue as the difference between making hiring as fair as possible, or making hiring ensure a certain outcome. The first option is good since it produces fair results, but the latter is actually what's happening in most places.
They don't help what? You haven't really responded to my point. And how to you plan to "remove any selection bias"? These efforts are there to counteract the selection bias that already exists. You say we should make hiring as fair as possible, but that, right there, is a big part of the goal of diversity policies.
We're miscommunicating. We both agree that hiring practices should be fair and objective as possible... what I'm saying is that is the goal itself, and a racial/ethnic/skintone/appearance-based diverse group may or may not be the outcome, but the outcome will be fair if the process is.
Diversity-based policies currently are only focused on the outcome, but the outcome is not what should be designed for. The outcome should just be what it will naturally be (whether it's "diverse" or not) and we should only control for selection and opportunity. This is what diversity-based policies do not help since you cannot work backwards from the outcome, you must start with making a fair process and just let people do what they want do beyond that.
> diversity of what exactly is the target? Life experience?
Clearly not when every company recruits from the same 10 schools.
Surely you can agree that every student is an individual and just because they go to the same college does not mean they all have the same background?
No, but I would argue it makes them less diverse than their physical traits. Especially considering that college is a formative time for most people.
If it's not about physical traits (which is good) then why does it matter? You realize every company does in fact discriminate for talent? (which is also fine).
We all want smartest, more capable and most reliable people, not a mix of smart and average and dumb just to "represent". Picking the top schools aligns for that, as long as your competitive enough to hire them.
I challenge your characterization of anyone who's not from Stanford or an Ivy as dumb
However, if that's what you want to believe then more power to you. Hire whoever you want. I'm just agreeing with OP that the target of diversity programs is decidedly not to get diversity of life experience -- because there are much better ways to attain that than hiring by skin color or gender.
No, but in-state tuition has to contribute significantly to where you go to college.
Only if you go to a public, state school.
Otherwise, in-state tuition probably can't be a factor.
> Also nobody ever seems to ask: diversity of what exactly?
https://www.bis.org/review/r160531e.pdf asks literally "Diversity of what exactly?"
Diversity in any non-job-related axis along which candidates have historically been excluded.
Diversity, even based on outward appearance, has real-world advantages for companies. Or at least, lack of it can lead to making serious errors that can lead to underserving or even insulting customers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apolog...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/09/faceapp-spa...
https://www.rt.com/viral/400927-robots-racist-sexist-bank-lo...
http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-huawei-smartphone-bea...
> As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
But why does that make it okay? I absolutely believe that you're right in that there has been worse discrimination over the decades and that maybe old white men can find jobs elsewhere, but that doesn't make discrimination okay. It's not okay when those "old school companies" discriminate against any minorities and it's not okay when some discriminate against old white men.
I don't think OP said that it made it OK. (It doesn't). I think OP was saying that people like her had to fight through worse - not to say it doesn't matter, but to place it in perspective and context.
Say 100% discrimination is the KKK lynching people. Say 50% discrimination is redlining and refusal to hire. Then what are white males facing? Maybe 10%? Yes, it matters. And also yes, it's not in the same league as what other groups have had to face.
> Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
More recent studies don't show any bias against women in callback rates. In fact, some show slight bias for women (and if you're willing to look at non peer reviewed sources, more than a slight: https://talent.works/blog/2018/01/08/the-science-of-the-job-...)
another study supports this claim:
"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."
source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
“We built our castle 300 miles away from where they live, but if any of them make it here we are 3% more likely to let them in the door. The men live in a village 1000 yards away, but we’re 3% less likely to let one in, so it’s fair.”
Or, to look at it this way: We cut our cake up to 10 pieces. You keep eight of them and I keep two of them. You eat one piece and I eat two pieces. And then I'm the glutton because I ate more pieces than you did and you can't argue with the numbers.
do you have any proof of this claims? and if they were true how and in what you way would this matter if we were to compare one individual to one individual instead of treating people like herds.
I didn’t make a claim.
I hate the fact that you need to state "you're a mixed race woman in tech.". I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming the outrage culture instilled in big part by a bigoted academic clique.
In any discussion of a social problem there are apologists. There are only so many ways to signal that you’re not a shill. It’s not a great solution, but we don’t have better.
I agree on the data thing. I think when you get down to the bottom of things, lumping people under a label and treating them as a cohesive unit is part of the problem. If that’s true, getting permission from a small cohort of that group is still bad, because you’re assuming if these three people are okay with it then it’s okay.
It’s that incident with Chevy Chase and the n-word that started this line of thought for me. I don’t care if Richard Pryor said it was okay. He is one voice. Don’t act surprised if other people don’t agree. Being surprised means you’ve already decided all black people are the same and a sample size of one means you’re okay to do something.
There are only so many ways to signal that you’re not a shill. It’s not a great solution, but we don’t have better.
Or, people can learn to read and act on the content of an argument rather than immediately trying to discredit someone with appeals to popular bigotry.
If we were discussing the merits of React vs Angular, sure.
But in general, telling someone they've been a jerk all their life leads to certain existential crises that they will do just about anything to avoid.
People don't just get defensive, they get cruel. There's a whole group of tricks that are basically gaslighting the person. They take an aggressively "reasonable" stance and trying to convince the person they're crazy and it's all them.
Because this happens often enough that many of these 'overtures' are obvious, it makes interacting with moderates a waste of time. I've seen person after person get DDOSed by a handful of people throwing walls of text at them but really just tangenting the conversation off into oblivion.
So when someone who is actually in your group takes a moderate position, unless you know them personally, you can't know if they're really a moderate or just a troll. That's not to say you spend effort on people at the extremes, it just means you are hesitant about overly-moderate people the way you are about people asking you for help on a street corner. You've tried it before and it's a scam so often you don't even want to make eye contact.
Stating this fact is the only way this comment could possibly be noticed. I wouldnt be surprised if lieing to this extent is the only way that these anecdotes could ever see the light of day. Though it doesnt change the validity of the points made
I've been accused of lying about it before to get attention. Realistically I only state it as a precaution because lately some of the things I've posted on other venues get an immediate comment calling me a Nazi and I want to avoid all the explanation and just get to discussing the issues.
I would prefer it if all of us could leave gender/race/religion at the door and talk but that's now the how the internet works now.
> bigoted academic clique
Ah, everybody's a bigot but the actual bigots
mordern feminsts professors hold fringe ideas about human nature that are far too extreme to the point that it contradicts current scientific findings while also being caught using what can only be called authoritarian methods. A group that holds strong ideas, refuses to change them and uses authoritarian policies to shutdown debate is, in my opinion, bigoted. One of the most recent examples in memory is the Laurier university Case you check it out here: https://globalnews.ca/video/3867811/extended-excerpts-from-s...
more about that incident: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/wilfrid-lau...
this is the same university that gave away a pay raise based on gender: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-pay-rais... That ended up in some female professors that were hired in the same time as some male professors having a higher pay after the raise even though they were paid the same before it.
>> I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women.
Then there must be a biological difference between women from different cultures that's also contributing, because I've only observed this "lack of interest" in Anglosphere women.
From my experience, for instance, Indian women have no such problem and are in fact strongly represented within the IT profession and I've worked alongside several of them. Women in my country of birth (Greece) have no such problem and about two fifths of the Greek programmers I know are women. In the British universities I studied and the British workplaces I worked in the last few years, on the other hand, women are about a tenth of all programmers I've met.
So because it's a bit absurd for Anglo women to be so specifically genetically programmed to stay out of the IT professions, I'm going to assume it's not a genetic, but a cultural thing going on.
Btw, I've discussed this with a female Indian software engineer I was working with and she explained that in India, working in IT is seen as an office job and so more suited to women. Traditional gender roles, innit.
There is plenty of evidence that there are genetic differences in how the brain is build up between men and women [0]. Several studies have also found that as early as 3 year old children will develop differences in their cognition; boys will develop better spatial skills at that age compared to girls, on the other hand the girls will have a better memory recall than the boys. This development can then be traced all the way into adulthood with a variety of skillsets (not only spatial tasks but eye-hand coordination, motor skills, reaction times, recollection, processing speed and verbal skills) [1]
Now this doesn't mean women are incapable or bad at copmuter engineering or anything in IT. Quite the opposite, women are just as capable and can be just as good in IT as men, there is no reason they can't.
If what you say is true and indian culture views IT as an office job and therefore a woman's job, then I don't see how that contradicts the assertion that there are biological cognitive differences, women can do the same job, they are just less inclined to be interested in it. On average.
So while gender roles may play a role (pun intended) in the distribution of gender in the IT job, expecting a 50/50 representation is entirely fictional, there will be a bias towards one or the other based on simple cognitive development tendencies.
---
0: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00429-017-1600-2
1: doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.10.011.
I think a reasonable person can find snippets of what he wrote distasteful. But it’s more like uncomfortable. I agree there is truth in it.
It’s very obvious to me that the negative reaction was greatly amplified by the ever-outraged and ever-posturing social (media) justice contingent.
I'm Eastern-european, and not fully aware of the US cultural issues. I participated at a company (US) "principal scientists summit", and the issue of women in tech was brought up. As the lady presented the data, and how we're making progress on hiring more women but there's still no equality, I asked the (innocent/legitimate, I thought) question "how are we doing compared to graduation stats". Seemed natural to me to look at that data in order to figure whether we're getting increasingly worse "return on investment" by focusing exclusively on hiring, but it was immediately spun off into me being somewhat sexist for suggesting that "we don't have a women-hiring problem". Which is not what I meant to imply at all! And from there on, there was sensible tension in the air, with some people taking to take my side without making "career-limiting" statements. It's crazy how taboo some subjects are, at least in California...
(it's secondary, but FWIW, I'd debate that the Damore memo contained a lot of truth: yes it contained some truth, but it contained more/deeper falsehoods and wrong conclusions, IMO. So it's a bit unproductive to focus on the "truth" part. OTOH it's horrifically unproductive and wrong to fire someone for expressing a misguided, but not inherently evil/malicious p.o.v.)
> I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women.
I don't think anyone believes in the opposite, that biological difference in gender plays exactly zero part in lack of interest in tech from women. The memo was suggesting this could play a part, but not whether if biological differences are significant or even meaningful.
To the best of my knowledge, we can't disentangle biological from cultural biases across gender. Hunting down biological reasons isn't productive and threatens gender equality initiatives, hence the massive backlash.
Should we question the ideals of gender equality in the workplace? That's probably the discussion the memo wanted to inspire, but it only led to out cries of "sheeple better wake up" and "hell no."
The really sad part is you have to preface your comments with this "Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech." Somehow this gives you legitimacy in the eyes of others, not the power and logic of your argument. It speaks to the left's misguided philosophy of "free speech so long as we approve what you say."
Stupid question, just to get a sense of the context of your testimony: are you working for Google or a similarly prestigious organisation? I can certainly expect “a "Software Engineer" who can't write a SQL statement” in some of the company I worked for a decade ago but I’d be confused to see those at Google. I saw one at Facebook (middle-aged white male) but he left the company after ten days and anyone’s reaction was a really confused: “How did he…?”
No, I don't want to name my company for obvious reasons but it's not Google or Facebook, not in the same league. It's an organization with around 400 engineers in it total, so not a small shop, but not a giant household name either.
Wouldn't it be more expected at google? I didn't think they had a lot of traditional databases, so it's not a relevant skill for them. They've also got a fair few low level guys working in c and the like that I wouldn't expect to know much about sql.
yes, but we use SQL in our job daily, if only for validation, but also we write a lot of scripts for reporting, migration etc. It's pretty crucial for the job and we've turned away several candidates for not being strong enough in SQL/TSQL
>As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
Its not that way for white guys to receive hundreds of Nos?
> I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status.
How do you know that they were hired just because of their minority status?
Because the hiring manager personally told me that was why he hired the person and why the white guy and Indian guy was not getting a call. More than once. And one of them even said that this was a direct order from their manager. They were told to improve diversity metrics. When you tell a direct report to do something, you should not be surprised when they do it.
Because there are explicit examples of this with supporting evidence given in the lawsuit.
No, there aren't. There are alleged examples and supposed evidence of lots of things in the lawsuit, but that isn't one of them.
Yes, in paragraphs 174 to 198, but specifically 179 to 181.
Nothing in 174-198 is supported by evidence in the filing (this isn't unusual at this stage, since that's not generally required in an initial filing, but your claim was of evidence), except 188, which is part of an allegation of adverse politically-motivated job treatment, not hiring based on race/gender.
So, no, there are no examples with evidence of people hired just for minority status in the lawsuit filing.
Yes there is, there's an email embedded in the paragraphs I outlined.
You might think that's not direct evidence, but it's evidence that supports the story in the paragraphs I outlined.
It says explicitly in paragraph 179: "Upon information and belief, the Google employee was not selected due to the fact that the hiring managers were looking solely for “diverse” individuals, and as a Caucasian male, the Google employee did not help fill their mandatory (and illegal) quotas."
And then "the Google employee’s former director initiated a “Diversity Team Kickoff” with the intent to freeze headcount so that teams could find diversity candidates to help fill the empty roles. Google was specifically looking for women and non-Caucasian individuals to fill these roles."
I think _you_ think that _I_ think this is damning proof and that the case is settled, and I've never claimed that. I just said that there are examples of people being hired because of their diversity status, with supporting evidence.
I'm not saying the evidence is true, or that it's directly related, but it _is_ "supporting evidence".
> Yes there is, there's an email embedded in the paragraphs I outlined
Yes, at 188; I addressed it. It's evidence provided for something, but not the thing you claimed.
> It says explicitly in paragraph 179: "Upon information and belief, the Google employee was not selected due to the fact that the hiring managers were looking solely for “diverse” individuals, and as a Caucasian male, the Google employee did not help fill their mandatory (and illegal) quotas."
Yes, that's an allegation. No evidence supporting this allegation is included (and, further, it used the “on information and belief” language which indicates that the party filing the lawsuit does not have first-hand knowledge that the allegation is true, but expects to have evidence—e.g., attained through discovery—to prove it should the case go to trial.)
This is perfectly normal for a lawsuit complaint, of course, but does not support your claim of examples (or even an example) with evidence in the filing.
I really don't mean to be obnoxious or disagree just for the sake of saving face or whatever - I really just don't understand how you can claim that those passages are not an example of someone being denied a team position because they were explicitly favoring minority-candidates instead.
I understand that it's not proof of it, like I said, and I understand that there's no direct evidence supporting that claim.
What I'm saying is that the email they embed there is supporting evidence of the narrative outlined in those paragraphs.
And I don't understand how you can say "no evidence supporting this allegation is included" then.
At this point, I'm not sure how to phrase myself to get my point across either - english is a second language, so please excuse me.
I'm quite certain that we are in agreement - what we probably disagree with is my distilling this down to the single sentence that I did initially.
But even that is a sentence distilled in good faith on my part, I don't feel that I misrepresented it that badly, and it's the kind of sentence I'd use around the dinner table until someone wanted to dig further into it.
>Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.
That maybe one of the saddest statements in the history of modern discourse. It’s not your fault for saying it, it’s that you needed to say it.
We have reached the point where identity matters more than content. This is the exact opposite of the MLK dream as I understood it.
>Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.
No offence but I think it's kind of harmful to everyone when you make arguments based on your race and gender.
The issue is that if that statement had not been included than OP would have been accused of being privileged and thus disqualified from having an opinion.
Exactly, I'm not using it to bolster my statement, rather to prevent being called a Nazi
> Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.
Why would it matter that you are "a mixed race woman in tech"? Your comment should be judged only by its content, not by its author's race or gender, right?
Of course, that's how it used to be, but posting this without my profile picture next to it would bring out accusations of being sexist/nazi etc if I didn't clarify.
I’ll violate my usual practice of not commenting explaining the reason for downvotes, to say this:
Preemptive comments of this type, which reflect the posters hostile prejudgement of the likely responses, are IMO, contrary to the letter and spirit of the HN guidelines including the rule of presumption of good faith, frequently (as in this case) involve preemptive violations of the guideline against commenting on downvotes, and contribute to a hostile atmosphere rather than productive debate.
If you are going to post something, with or without a disclaimer about your own background, do so without commenting about how you expect people to react in comments or votes. If there are responses you take issue with, take issue with them when they exist.
That would be true for the content of a comment about whether .NET is dead or not. But then for that type of comment, you might judge it differently if the author is a user of Microsoft dev tools vs if she primarily works with open source tools.
>People notice it, but few say it.
Of course. They'd get fired.
Kudos for such a well balanced piece. At the end of the day, it should be who can get the job done, that is all. And that is how companies will stay robust.
You know what makes me even angrier, social injustice
After your first two paragraphs, you mostly allude to the truths contained in Damore's document.
Could you elaborate a little more about its "ugliness"?
"It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth."
That's just it; it really did not. It contained a lot of things that people who aren't members of those groups he targeted think are plausible.
"I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. "
And what, specifically, would those differences be?
And what, specifically, would those differences be?
The balance of the evidence, is that there are some biological differences in preferences. Both biological and cultural factors are at play. As groups, women and men are about the same in terms of average IQ, however, men tend to have a higher population of the extreme outliers. (Both extremely smart men and extremely stupid men.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Is there any evidence that this is biological, as opposed to cultural?
In short, yes. You should look up the book which is cited in this video, and you should listen to the discussion of the prologue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
Since the human brain and its interaction with culture is very complicated, more research is needed. But a fair reading of what we have so far would seem to indicate: it's both.
Beware of ideological just-so stories that make you feel good. Also, if it sounds messy and complicated, it sounds like actual biology and psychology.
It looks like there is only indirect evidence, and no direct evidence. In fact, the whole discussion smells far too much of "correlation means causation" to get anything useful out of it.
There are some great weasel words like: "there is good evidence ... play a role ..."
Without a hypothetical mechanism, this is all quite speculative.
>> Is there any evidence that this is biological, as opposed to cultural?
> [Plenty]
> It looks like there is only indirect evidence,
And there go the goalposts, red-shifting into the sunset.
> "correlation means causation" / "there is good evidence ... play a role ..."
Well, remember that Damore's claim was that there is evidence that we cannot categorically rule out biological causes for the skewed representation, in addition to discrimination.
For that claim, even much weaker evidence than what exists would have been sufficient.
Damore’s claim was that the evidence justified specific corporate policy responses, including rejecting several of Google’s public core values.
Nah. His claim was that there was enough evidence to question policies (secret policies that were in violation of those public core values and probably also the law) that are based on the completely unfounded assumption that discrimination/bias/oppression is the only possible cause for unequal representation.
It's more like Damore's claim was that specific corporate policy were based on the assumption of the opposite. Also, he did not reject Google's core values, unless you take a biased and imputational reading.
> It's more like Damore's claim was that specific corporate policy were based on the assumption of the opposite
No, while that was a supporting claim, the conclusory claims everything in the manifesto are offered to support are that specific policy changes are justified.
> Also, he did not reject Google's core values, unless you take a biased and imputational reading.
As an example, empathy is a core publicly-stated internal value of Google which Damore explicitly called for de-emphasizing. There's nothing “biased and imputational” about reading Damore’s words to mean what they explicitly say.
> everything in the manifesto are offered to support are that specific policy changes are justified.
No. The main reason he gives for policy changes is that the policy isn't working. Numbers haven't budged, despite measures getting ever more extreme and likely illegal. He then suggests that maybe, just maybe, the policy is based on a false assumption. And then delivers some evidence that this could be true. And then presents some ideas of what policies might have a better chance of working.
> empathy is a core publicly-stated internal value of Google which Damore explicitly called for de-emphasizing
Where? I've searched a bunch of places and can't find this, for example:
https://www.google.com/about/philosophy.html
I also googled "google values" and none of the posts so far have had "empathy" in them, though it could be that I haven't searched enough. Anyway, empathy is not a value. Empathy is an emotional capacity. His criticism of empathy is, as far as I can tell, based on the thesis of Paul Bloom's recent book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. [1][2][3].
"Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/books/review-against-empa...
There is quite a distance between:
"We cannot rule out biological causes" and "We should base our HR policy on this speculative research".
"We should not base our corporate policy on the completely unproven and highly unlikely assumption that oppression is the only possible cause of unequal representation"
There, fixed that for you.
Also, the research is not at all speculative, quite the opposite. It is immeasurably more solid than the blind assertion that unequal representation is caused entirely/solely by oppression/discrimination etc., for which there is very little evidence overall, and virtually none that holds up to any sort of scrutiny.
Given that there is no known mechanism, characterizing it as "the opposite of speculative" seems rather naive.
Sorry, I can't parse this. Are you saying that until we have a complete understanding of how the brain and mind work, all psychological research is essentially worthless?
On the contrary, I'm saying that speculative research probably isn't suitable for crafting HR policies.
So you agree with James. Glad we could clear that up.
Background: there is little to no evidence for the assertion that discrimination/oppression is the sole cause of the under-representation of women in tech, but that assertion is the basis of the HR policies that Damore criticized. In fact, the evidence that it is even a contributing factor is at best scant/anecdotal.
The evidence that Damore cited is incomparably more solid.
ok what about this "Sex differences in brain size and general intelligence (g)" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...)
"Abstract
Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes."
I assume you are presenting this as another example of indirect correlational evidence, with no hypothetical mechanism.
The study examined female and male brains, found that males on average had a higher general intelligence score and a higher standard deviation. The study also found that male brains had on average higher surface area and size even if you control for body size. The study found that brain size in both genders on average leads to a higher g.
I don't understand how your criticism "indirect correlational evidence" applies to this study, could you maybe elaborate on how you would improve this study?
I presume you are offering this study as evidence of differences due to sex.
Yes isn't it?
No, it's evidence that they are correlated, not causal.
so you believe that physical difference between sexes in size of the brain, is not due to sex? what would you say this is caused by?
I would like to point out that saying this changes are due to evolution not sex is unvalid because then nothing will be due to sex, not saying that you think that but just getting it out of the way.
Well hell, the Newtonian laws of motion had no hypothetical mechanism for gravity for a rather long time. We're still in the early days of figuring out Homo sapiens. Don't get your knickers in a bunch, yet. It looks like you're uptight about something.
Nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about, is what I'd say about it. (Note, that term can refer to golf pants.)
a - Women have a higher capacity at empathy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221)
b - higher capacity of empathy might be in part to biological: "Testosterone may reduce empathy by reducing brain connectivity" http://www.psypost.org/2016/03/testosterone-may-reduce-empat...
c- people who have a higher level of empathy might be interrested in fields which need a higher level of empathy, or seek to join fields that directly interact with people [ I don't have a source for this one. It seems logical to me, but it is unproven. if you know a study that proves or disproves it. Please link it]
d - higher levels of women interessted in other fields leads to less women interrested in tech
EDIT: Deleted this comment as it was downvoted for not agreeing with the hivemind.
If you're going to delete your comment, delete it, but what you left here violates the HN guidelines. Please don't do that.
I watch a fair amount of Microsoft technical videos, and just off the top of my head I can think of 3 people who are very likely to be diversity hires.
Although at the same time and despite being pretty far right on the political spectrum, I think there is some truth to the idea that big companies "should" hire visible minorities over and above those that are fully qualified, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of legitimately qualified people, or that it causes significant harm to product quality.
I don't think minorities should be hired to be "visible", that doesn't sit right with me. Hiring minorities and even people from different economic backgrounds, country of origin etc is good for getting different perspectives and different ways of approaching problems.
The hard truth is if you only hire white guys from Stanford you've got a ton of overlap in their background and the way they think. If you only hire black women from Somalia it's the same. You're going to have significant similarities. Making teams more diverse is extremely important and beneficial as long as all are otherwise qualified.
There is nothing but debunked studies to back up your last statement as a generally applicable one. Obviously, it depends on the job.
Designers, sure, it's very eqsy to think of examples where diverse backgrounds improve business outcomes. But let's not pretend that there is any difference in business outcomes if Foxconn's assembly lines snapping iPhone parts together are entirely Chinese hands vs if they were to equally represent all members of the united nations.
Asserting that there is a benefit needs to be seriously qualified, as it can certainly be everything ranging from a benefit, to negligible, to an actual handicap.
> Almost all of the women from my social circle are smart, pragmatic, driven and successful yet have zero interest in a technical career. They excel in their given industries but ours they want no part of. I don't believe intelligence is more prevalent in either gender, but I do believe there are some traits that shape who we are.
That's most definitely a cultural thing, and I believe its what diversity programs try to address.
> As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
I get that, but I think your boss was still wrong to think and phrase of it that way. No one should be disqualified simply because of their race or age. Give more points to minorities? Yes definitely. But reducing points because you're of a certain race and age just sounds icky, and is probably illegal.
If the points are fungible (and they absolutely are) then what is the difference between giving extra points to <people not like x> and giving fewer points to <people like x>. How are they not functionally identical?
This isn't quite the same thing, but i've always found it annoying how it's generally okay to say, for example, that Chinese people are good at math but it's not okay to say that any other group is bad at math, even though the former claim is a relative claim that is presumably understood to be comparative to other groups of people, who are (on average) worse at math.
Why is it annoying? If I'm addressing a team of 5 people, I would much rather say that person A is amazing at math than tell 4 others that they suck at math.
Social skills are a thing, even if they're logically equivalent statements.
lots of folks are against that. Positive discrimination is a thing.
>That's most definitely a cultural thing, and I believe its what diversity programs try to address.
If it's a cultural thing, why is one version (attitude/culture) towards it considered better than the other (and thus one has to be "addressed")?
> That's most definitely a cultural thing
If it is a cultural thing, then surely the correct response is not to mandate gender balance in corporate hiring practices, but to alter the education and socialization of girls. Whether it is cultural or biological, the results are the same: fewer women have the interest to excel in specific fields. App Camp for Girls might be a better approach than diversity hiring.
> I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women.
The history of women in tech completely contradicts your belief. The lack of representation is a real problem, we can debate how to fix it, but to claim it doesn't exist is baseless and harmful.
https://hackernoon.com/a-brief-history-of-women-in-computing...
It doesn't. At all.
The issue is that it doesn't matter. Women might be less interested in tech, as in if you took 100 men and 100 women and measured their interest the men might be higher.
That doesn't mean no women are interested in tech, or that those who are interested are less competent.
I do think the idea of "less interested" is shallow and ignores every other explanation. For example, women are a majority in health care but a minority of doctors. Why?
That's shifting rapidly. Women are very close to 50% of medical school graduates as of 2015. [1]
[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra...
Not only this, but women still dominate nursing and many other healthcare professions, and women are increasingly preferred for certain specialist roles (e.g., OB-GYNs).
Nursing is one of the best all-around careers in the US when you take all factors into account (barriers to entry, pay, potential advancement, availability of jobs in both urban and rural areas, lack of ageism, long-term stability, etc.). Certain specialist nurses like CRNAs can make $150k+. Nurse practitioners also have a higher median salary than software developers in the US according to the BLS.
Women reached parity in law school graduation about two decades ago, but still lag in practicing law, becoming partners and becoming judges today so it may not be changing all that rapidly just based on that single statistic.
I don't have experience in law, but maybe those stats just need time to change. People that graduated from post-parity need time to reach the level of seniority needed.
> I do think the idea of "less interested" is shallow and ignores every other explanation. For example, women are a majority in health care but a minority of doctors. Why?
It's not that shallow. Using your example, the interesting things become visible when you dig down into different types of work done in the medical profession. Scott Alexander has a very convincing piece on the whole topic:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
The issue of interest is tackled in section IV of the post. If you scroll down to the end of the section, there are interesting charts there, showing gender distribution of doctors among medical specialties. The distribution happens to align nicely with the theory of differences in interests, explored in that section.
>The issue is that it doesn't matter.
It does matter. As technology becomes more deeply embedded into our society the assumptions made by the people that designed that technology get amplified and hardened. Have you not heard the story about the soap-dispenser that wouldn't recognize black skin? It's a minor annoyance now, but it won't be when the technology is responsible for more critical stuff.
https://mic.com/articles/124899/the-reason-this-racist-soap-...
>For example, women are a majority in health care but a minority of doctors. Why?
Becoming a doctor requires an immense amount of capital and free time. There are structural barriers that prevent women from accessing this capital and free time as easily as men can.
> There are structural barriers that prevent women...
There is also a long history of "men are doctors, women are nurses".
There can be positives of hiring to increase diversity which aren't related strictly to their performance in the role they occupy.
Two such arguments for this kind of policies:
- by giving them jobs which they wouldn't otherwise have the skills to fill you are trying to break the "cycle" (more on that below)
- having different viewpoints in a team can be beneficial beyond the skill set those people should bring according to their role (ex. for developing apps that don't just cater to the hipster young)
Another thing to consider is that the way you measure performance may be biased, resulted from decades of privileged groups having the leadership role in that domain/area and having developed it in certain ways that caters to their skill set.
For the "breaking the cycle" part, I mean that systematic discrimination results in people of certain origins simply not having the opportunity/chance to have developed the skills to be competitive with the privileged classes. And no, you can't just fix this by giving them a "chance to learn", some of the negative impacts on these groups of people are permanent and happen in early life. Obviously trying to handle this problem in the workplace is just a "hack", it's too late already but it does have the benefit that now those people get included in a social environment that they would normally be cut out from, get payed more than they would otherwise and, hopefully, this will trickle down to their children and grandchildren so in a few generations of doing this we don't actually need to be doing it anymore.
I'm not saying that all of this means I'm convinced affirmative action is doing more good than bad, just that I see it has possible benefits.
have the benefit that now those people get included in a social environment that they would normally be cut out from, get payed more than they would otherwise and, hopefully, this will trickle down to their children and grandchildren
Irish immigrants started out from a culture, where the typical peasant was 1/2 to 1/4th as wealthy as the median pre-Civil War American Slave. There was a period of time when ethnic Irish political machines helped to place the party faithful into cozy government jobs. This was beneficial, up to a point. However, there is a point where such subgroup politics becomes so corrupt, the leaders of that group keep their people in deliberate isolation to maintain their power.
The IQs of many ethnic immigrant groups to the US can be shown to have increased after several generations. The Polish and Italian immigrant groups' IQs increased from 85 to over 100 over the 1st half of the 20th century. There seems to have been a reversal of such trends for African American communities starting in the 60's. There are also studies of the African American children of US armed forces personnel in Germany. Their IQs are the same as other children growing up in Germany. My conclusion is that the leadership of the African American community and the influence of the US political Left, by glorifying a toxic subset of their ethnic culture, is holding the group back, in cultural isolation, in such a way as to harm the prospects of their children as strongly as lead in the water of Flint Michigan.
>The Polish and Italian immigrant groups' IQs increased from 85 to over 100 over the 1st half of the 20th century.
Yes, because of improved living conditions, and better food compared to the old country - not because of political leadership.
not because of political leadership
In part because of leadership -- chiefly thought leadership, a part of which came in the form of assimilation. The power of human capital -- culture -- should not be underestimated. If it's just access to resources like improved food and living conditions, then every group would progress at the same rate. If it's just access to resources, then giving people resources would automatically make them richer. However, there are a number of Africans who advocate stopping aid to Africa. Africa is full or resources, and Japan has very few. Why is Japan so much wealthier?
Most of the answer is human capital.
If the cultures of the Polish and Italians were not encouraging their younger generations to better their fortunes through education and business, then the cultures would have lowered the material wealth of the groups and held them back, in much the same way that the early Irish immigrants to the US lowered the quality of life in their slums.
In this, there is much hope. If cultural transmission can raise up the 19th century potato famine Irish to the 1st world mainstream, there is basically nothing it can't accomplish. (However, culture runs deep, below the level of the conscious mind. It can't be transmitted by simple edict.)
Disregarding the Flynn effect, the slow integration of Irish and the Catholics into American society prior to the end of Jim Crow and the fact that the US Black community and US mainstream left were lead by a black President who went to Harvard Law and Columbia, which toxic culture are they supposedly glorifying?
US mainstream left were lead by a black President who went to Harvard Law and Columbia
I voted for Obama. However, in retrospect, he was part of the shift of the American left into an authoritarian version. Those collegiate "progressive" protesters who say, "F your free speech" are part of this unfortunate shift.
which toxic culture are they supposedly glorifying?
Urban thug culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
There is a genteel African American culture. I've known people from that thread of American culture. It valued learning, rationality, responsibility, and manners. Also, not all Black Americans are too crazy about Obama's legacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPXTWJhnYM
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.
You must be from US.
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...
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.
And don't go witch-hunting.
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.
It happened with traditional music.
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.
> 1. We see no problem in dongle jokes
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'.
I'd agree that's absurd, but what Damore did was worse from a company perspective.
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.
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
> 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.
Spinning a fantasy? Please.
We are both speculating, that's all.
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.
> 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.
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-*"...
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.
He sent out a company-wide memo on a very controversial subject pretending to be an expert.
I don't know what he expected, but that was stupid.
> If people "on the left" won't allow him to speak, where exactly do you expect him to go?
Damore himself said he wanted to go on friendly media to do interviews, not that other media wouldn't have him.
"The far right is just a slip away from the reasonable right, therefore the reasonable right is dangerous?"
I'm pretty sure this is textbook slippery slope fallacy
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.
This is the heckler's veto. Free speech is a cultural matter, not just a protection from the federal and state governments.
Google is a private company. They have no obligation and having an employee that does not get along pretty obvious has to go.
Why also nobody is going to hire him.
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.
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.
You do not have pure freedom of association. Both a set of laws and our culture do not allow you to refuse to do business with people.
Yes. However, none of those laws prevent you from firing someone who is creating a hostile work environment for your other employees.
freedom of association is incidental to my initial response. I was speaking about freedom of speech they are different things.
Google is trying to run a company and having someone like Damore does not help that cause.
Firing someone is speech? A whole lot of laws disagree with you about that.
Firing someone is part of the right to free association.
It's limited. You don't get to fire someone for being black, or Jewish, or male, and crucially in California, for political speech you disagree with.
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.
He absolutely is not. He’s (moderately) liberal. The absurdly polarized social media scene has moved the window.
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.
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.
> 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.
Would you go on the Young Turks if you were him? It'd be like walking before a firing squad.
I would go on a 1 on 1 interview with Cenk Uygur.
And you've watched the one he did with Sam Harris?
Yes. What is wrong with that interview?
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.
Uhh, he had The Entire Internet doing that at him 24/7, why do you think there needs to be more?
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.
Well, whether you disparage it or not, grouping Joe Rogan and Milo together doesn't seem very accurate.
Do you think any of those would have had him on?
I doubt he got many invites.
> 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.
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.
Small edit: "and negotation" should be "and collective negotation"
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.
Jordan Peterson especially sounds like every traditionalist Catholic I know. Which is fine, but at least they wear their stripes proudly.
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.
GP is asking you how you concluded that Joe Rogan is right wing podcast.
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.
That sounds like absolute nonsense.
So was he disingenuous, or did he lack understanding? Pick one.
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?
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.
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.
"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 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.
What hyperbole are you objecting to?
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.
"What hyperbole are you objecting to?"
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
and denies the moon landing. That doesn't make him right wing, but it sure makes him a less credible person.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/02/26/jo...
He denied it 11 years ago you mean, by that blog post. He has changed his stance, as seen here:
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.
I had no idea, thanks!
He mentioned in one of his interviews that very few left wing outlets would even invite him to interviews.
Of the ones that did, it was heavily edited to present a certain bad narrative of him.
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.
If the memo wasn't enough
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.
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...
Never knew joe organ was right wing. I've been listening to his podcasts which seem pretty good.
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.
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.
> the left wing outlets except for Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin had no interest in letting his real story come out
Which ones did he ask to speak on?
I don't think he is, a gave a couple reasons why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16099356
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.
Christ. He isn't, and for the love of god, stop reading things that people on the internet tell you and immediately accepting them as fact.
Even what I just said, that he isn't, you should go look up, investigate, and see what YOU think.
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?
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
marxists.... peterson?
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.
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.
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.
I would argue they made that bed for themselves.
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.
The left has intolerant people as well...However, somehow they aren't running the party like they are on the right.
The intolerant left seems to have Berkeley buttoned up.
> YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1]
Some of these aren't like the others.
Um, guilt by association much?
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.
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.
> 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?
But can he sustain that? Or is he something of a ‘flavor of the month’ that people will stop carrying about in a year or two?
Is this just an attempt to extend his relevance a bit longer?
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.
If his settlement is 7 figures, he can retire off of that.
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.
>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?
That was just a joke, stop pretending he is a neo-nazi.
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.
Did your read the memo? It is hardly a far-right opinion piece...
He'd be a bleeding heart CA liberal in Texas. I'm with you.
The memo might not be, but his public speaking record since seems to be further right than that.
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.
He can get a job in any republican state, people will probably silently agree about the things he said, or the media painted him to have said.
I would imagine he could pretty easily get contracting work at a place that doesn't care.
Or create "Not James Damore Consulting, Inc." and hire himself out through that.
I notice none of those options include "admit he was wrong and apologize". I'm sure he doesn't have to work for a top-tier tech company either.
It sounds like you're suggesting he both lies, and acts with disingenuity. I don't think it's reasonable to ask him to do that.
I would assume that any apology would be backed up by some king of statement about what he has learned since the memo.
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?
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.
That's not an apology, that's being a passive-aggressive nerd.
That's exactly my point. I can't imagine any way of him saying the truth about the memo situation that wouldn't also sound passive-aggressive at best.
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.
The key is to be sincere. A fake apology would be a terrible idea.
Well then doesn't he deserve what he gets?
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
I guess in that sense, everybody deserves whatever they get.
Well no, if someone went crazy and tried to murder him over this that would be a pretty inappropriate response.
I do get your point though.
Has that worked in the past?
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.
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.
However, you can't do that with an angry mob.
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.
It doesn't work in the case of moral panics like this.
Apologizing only convinces the people who are called for his head that they were correct. Usually it will lead to further sanctions.
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.
You’ve apologized to an angry mob. When?
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.
Mozilla isn't exactly in the best state, even before he left, so maybe it's turning out better for him. Not to mention that Brave just launched a ICO.
From Wikipedia:
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.
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.
Well nobody on the other side did anything close to "considering that what they did was wrong".
Do you actually think that would get him anywhere?
> 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.
Regardless, he'll be fine.
Actually, someone else released his memo externally.
"Then he published an internal memo arguing against that stance."
Feedback was explicitly solicited, and he published it in that forum.
If the company doesn't want views that might contradict current policy, it should not solicit feedback.
He should have made a better argument then.
"We have a verdict, and darn it, we will find a crime to fit that verdict."
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).
> "Ruined?" Because he might have to take a non-tech job? Please.
There are more tech jobs than those at Google, Facebook, etc.
> 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.
> no big company will ever hire him
Palantir or Peter Thiel will just have him well.
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
I see no irony here. The anti-union feeling is prevalent in SV and has little to do with this affair.
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.
I don't think it's about keeping a job any more.
he could be CTO of Breitbart
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.
This actually seems like a very realistic outcome.
Gab.ai would hire him in a minute.
> due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Autism does not cause you to be a bigot.
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.
I hope the Google lawyers make an example out of him and he gets nothing.
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.
No that just isn't how life does or should work.
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.
That and also There was also google managers talking about having personal blacklists on twitter.
It's why I think this google will settle with Damore for a very high amount, because discovery will not be good for them.
Ethnicity and gender are on their job application form.
No it isn't. Try applying for a job:
I did, it asked me. Was I being given a "personalized" application perhaps?
> 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.
In a jury trial there are few certainties. The other questions are who else joins the class and what gets discovered.
From the article:
> 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.
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.
Edit: ebbv beat me to it
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.
that was actually a point in his memo.
"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."
> We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration
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.
a limit to how hot something can get get, doesn't imply that something shouldn't be hot.
There's a difference between "fewer women wind up having the skills for X" and "women are worse at X".
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.
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.
>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.
You think sociological explanations for why women are under-represented in tech are made up?
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.
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.
> He believes abilities, not just preferences,
> 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...
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...
https://herosports.com/nfl/women-fastest-growing-market-foot...
wow, a decade of marketing overpowered millenia of biology ad cultural history.
If you don't believe biology is the reason then it's a big difference.
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...
It's a little grating, to be honest. The tech world loves statistics and empirical research until it clashes with their world view.
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.
It's okay for his conclusions to be wrong. It's not okay to misrepresent his argument and publicly shame him for it.
What a ridiculous comment.
(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.
I mean this stuff has been studied for years:
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.
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.
> 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.
And where is the evidence that biology is a factor in influencing career choice ? Haven't seen anything like that to date.
Equally valid is having is that having to work with socially inept people reduces the appeal.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Men are worse at understanding the overlap in response to those two variants.
“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)
The more obvious reason is women are sick of having to deal with an industry full of people like Damore.
I know I am.
You will never achieve social justice with hate.
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.”
No it doesn't. It suggests that abilities may be distributed differently. People are not identical.
However there's not much of a different between:
"fewer women wind up having the skills for X in part due to biological causes" and "women are worse at X".
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.
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"
Does this paper actually demonstrate the "due to biological reasons" part?
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.
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."
The latter implies far more about the competence of women who do have the skills for X.
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.
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?
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?
Sounds good! So let's just hire the best candidate regardless of race or sex. Problem solved.
And what happens if you don't?
Apparently I'll only accept objective scientific claims to the contrary. We're turning over a new leaf here.
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...
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.
Would it be fair then to describe Google's hiring policy as preferring the best candidate regardless of race / sex?
No, because "best" is highly unscientific and subjective, and can change in an uncountable number of ways depending on environment.
Ok, then what's your objective and scientific way of hiring?
There isn't one. That's the point. So don't make claims about it.
> 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.
What are you talking about? This is completely unrelated to what I said.
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.
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...
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.
He's talking about distributions, while the article makes out that he is talking about all women in general.
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.
>Why do news outlets persistently misrepresent what he actually said?
Because this creates controversy, controversy creates engagement and engagement brings more ad revenue to the news outlets.
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.
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.
"Misunderstanding statistical distribution" https://medium.com/@martinweigert/misunderstanding-probabili...
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.
Again, that's not the argument. Even stating that men are more suited to become programmers* is problematic!
Is it problematic if it's true?
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.
Probably something like "Women are more interested in other fields, so they end up working in these fields instead of tech."
Try reading the memo- with all the citations to research- instead of assuming.
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.
News outlets generate income through sensationalism, and that's the storyline that they need to drive the most traffic.
This has nothing to do with the news and everything to do with what Damore did.
He was fired for a reason.
No he didn't. Stop spreading lies.
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.
This comment breaks the HN guideline against calling names in arguments. We ban accounts that do that, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that.
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.
Techcrunch is just setting themselves up for libel
Hard to sue publications.
Not sure Gawker would agree with you.
Relitigating this in a Hacker News sub-thread seems like a bad way to spend time.
Gawker wasn't sued for libel.
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.
> "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.
Is it libelous to interpret someones words in a way they don't like?
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?
> you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.
Maybe you shouldn't, but it ain't libel.
IANAL, but I think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misrepresentation
> 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.
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.
> Americans, even those who attend good schools, do not understand statistical claims.
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)?
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.
> Heh. I rest my case.
I'm Irish.
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.
Okay, replace engineering with management and that's exactly the argument he made.
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.
" It's because he's just another brogrammer...."
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...
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Two things:
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.
That's just bad reasoning.
> 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."
> I recommend actually reading the memo
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.
I recognize that, but it was evident that GP didn't read it in the first place.
> the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.
Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.
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.)”
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?
> 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.
> You're making stuff up.
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?"
Fair, edited my comment.
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.
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.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
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.
Which article? Not the feature from TC, I'd presume. If there's a good rebuttal to what Scott wrote out there, I'd love to read it!
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...
I used poor wording - it's just Grant's response, not a rebuttal. I appreciated that Scott included it.
> It's because he's just another brogrammer
ugh.
>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.
[citation needed]
You probably won't like the tone of this article, but I think you'll find it difficult to argue with it's citation list: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16153740/tech-diversity-p...
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 wording do you suggest they use?
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"
The article seems to have it correct to me?
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.
Yes. And?
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.
Also women aren't going into "high stress jobs" because they are too neurotic for them.
oh and diversity programs are bad. for some reason.
And what biological differences would those be?
Read the paper, including citations.
I think he said something about biologically less INTERESTED in engineering, nothing about capability.
The memo is online, you can verify in 10 seconds that he used the phrase "preferences and abilities".
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?
No?
The person who isn't interested wouldn't even be applying in the industry in the first place.
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.
Association fallacy [1].
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.
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 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.
> we saw proof of that in the last US election.
When Clinton got millions more votes?
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/348246-poll-google-was-... reports solid opposition to his firing. If only extremists are openly defending him, it's because they have less to fear.
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.
From his memo:
> 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'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.
Actual quote:
> 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?
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.
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.
The first sentence doesn't mention engineering.
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.
> Yeah, I do see the difference; the second sentence is spelling out plainly the bigotry he's trying to cloak in faux intellectualism.
The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
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.
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).
"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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 said "different" abilities
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.
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"?
> He said exactly that, right there.
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]
[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...
A = distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women
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.
Excellent summary.
> 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 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.
It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass.
It appears to me that in part this may be explained by him attempting to cover his ass.
So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?
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.
The comment I was replying to seems to have been edited from what it originally said, apparently taking into account what I posted.
Even the TL;DR on page 2 says it:
> 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
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
Nowhere in that quote is it stated that women are biologically less capable of engineering.
ability (noun) 1. possession of the means or skill to do something. 2. talent, skill, or proficiency in a particular area.
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.
Looking only at the section you sight, that's not what he says. In fact those sentences have so many degrees of freedom they hardly say anything.
This is the very next sentence from his memo:
> 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.
What part of that quote is repugnant?
>preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes
I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.
If you can't prove something one way or another, it seems like a poor foundation upon which to build your HR policy, as Damore suggests.
I think the "preferences" part carries more weight. More men want to be engineers than women.
> preferences and abilities
Men also select more career oriented roles with higher pay, of which CS careers are one of the main ones.
And if all Damore said was that he would still be at Google.
I don't know why you are being downvoted.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know, I'm pretty liberal and I find political discussions on HN to be overbearing at times.
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.
Because their repugnancy/crappiness meters are calibrated in such a way that by their standards, it really wasn't.
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.
What? He actually does say that...
> 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.
No, he didn't say that.
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 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.
You assume that "the lower average" group will apply as much (i.e. lower ability people will apply too) as the "higher average" group.
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.
Hm, you are saying one will get equal average skill/interest rates above the cut, if one includes that good people are more likely to apply?
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.
Well Damore tried to make a lot arguments, I think his (main) fault wasn't in omitting some important ones.
And thanks, I'm thinking about making blog a lot, but I have no time.
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.
That's maybe why we should stop focusing on a 10 word quote and maybe read and understand the full memo (which provides context) ?
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.
Except his point was indefensible, because it was (at best) poorly written.
we are all arguing about a 10 word quotes because that is what the media have chosen to focus on.
If you read the full memo, you understand what he aims at and I don't think it is poorly written.
It's a lot better written than most of the articles critisizing it.
And that is what decades of replicated science confirms.
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.
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.
Sounds like he was a bad culture fit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
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.
It's at the bottom of the page.
> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.
I see it now. I believe that's something every major US Corp that sells to the federal government has to say: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
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.
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...
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.
> Very few people actually read it.
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.
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.
> Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally.
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.
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.
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.
"If you change what he said it sounds worse" lol, is that seriously your argument?
It's a very good argument. Behavior that is ok for one group should be ok for another group, and viceversa. That is a truth of equality.
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 a very good argument.
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.
I think there's a different point -- that we're willing to ignore certain avenues of discussion to maintain a civil society.
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.
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.
>circulating a secret memo around your company
>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?
Going privately to people who disagree with you and talking to them respectfully about the issue you disagree on is a start.
Everyone was publicly disagreeing with him though so why should he remain private?
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.
Yes, I gave the memo a chance.
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.
> Google actively solicited this feedback from it's employees.
I don't understand Google's internal culture at all.
> 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 believe he was fired and subjected to outrage before he went on the "media crusade". Probably in order to clear his name.
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.
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.
In my experience the left was not capable of having reasoned debate even before the election. They prefer to shut it down.
On what topic?
That humans aren't blank slates.
If you're talking about Damore then I believe that's less about what was said and more about how it was stated.
The context was "the left .. not capable of having reasoned debate even before the election. They prefer to shut it down."
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.
You need a very minimal amount of social skill to succeed in programming - just enough to not piss coworkers off too badly while working together on projects. Past that, you get mostly quiet and controlled environments, managers willing to let you work on your special interests, and generally get left alone to stare at your screen and type things out. This is one of the best working environments you can find for autistic people. And all these factors that make it so good for autistics makes it more hellish for neurotypicals: you have techies to socialize with who do not like to be interrupted, lots of time expected to be working instead of socializing, and your soft-skills aren't particularly well suited for making the computer do the things you want.
There are something like three to five times as many autistic males than females, depending on the cutoff point and study used. I'm honestly astounded that people are rejecting the biological claim, given how strongly it attracts autistics.
IMHO, a lot of inclusivity-in-tech movements are horrifically ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups. It's about goddamn time there's some push-back against these sorts of gentrifying movements, they're incredibly bad for the work environment interests of autistics.
The best thing about your post is that it argues for the interest group of people who don't play all the reindeer games, but can still be valuable members of a team.
The worst thing about your post (that isn't at all your fault), is that there isn't a strong argument for them palatable to the hegemony short of "ableism."
If the explanation in your first paragraph is true, then does it stand to reason that there are non-autistic people with weak soft skills? Or simply prefer an individualistic, distraction-free workplace?
My answer to this rhetorical question is: Yes, obviously, as long as you don't tautologically define anyone with a below-threshold appetite for social interaction at work as autistic.
It's fashionable in SV to talk of empathy, tolerance, acceptance etc... Yet from the outside I see a very close-minded bubble that demands people comport to so many social standards that nobody actually finds necessary for professionals to work productively. They'll let people get away with non-conformance only if they've got an excuse that would be a political landmine to cross (e.g. ableism re: autism).
Like all disability accomodations, it's useful for people without that disability. Curb cutouts are useful for hand trucks, for instance. But yeah, there's people who simply prefer that sort of environment, and it's also shitty behavior against them.
Your argument that “inclusivity-in-tech [is] ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups” is interesting and probably a much better way to represent a claim similar to Damore in a far less offensive way to women. I can personally name a handful of non-neuro-typical people who would wholeheartedly agree (half of them females because my friends are frustratingly non-representative).
However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger’s scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a small portion overall. That difference doesn’t come close to explaining the gender gap. Maybe you care for all introverts (who resent interruptions) including the majority of introverts who are neuro-typical. I do believe most programmers are introvert but I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion but I’d be surprised if it were large enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.
>However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger’s scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a small portion overall. That difference doesn’t come close to explaining the gender gap.
That's why I included the part about the programming work environment generally being unpleasant and demanding. I didn't make the connection explicit, but "high paying job that sucks" is a preferential attractor for male workers. 90% of workplace deaths are men, men tend to do more things like "work on dangerous and dirty oil rigs", men tend to work more hours than women, and women tend to accumulate in more personally rewarding jobs such as teaching or social work. The end result is a gross earnings gap that basically disappears when you control for these sorts of choices.
So to be explicit: becoming a programmer is a choice that pays well, but is difficult work, requires a large time commitment to study, and is not intuitively gratifying. On that basis alone I'd expect outsized male participation.
>I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion
In terms of big-5 personality traits, the gendered differences are that women tend to score higher on Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I don't think it's particularly relevant to this whole discussion, though.
So, having finally gone through this in detail, what strikes me the most about this as a legal filing is that it seems very unlikely to be certified as a class action. A class action usually required a simple factual mechanism to identify class members; part of the point of a class action is to avoid needing to litigate the details of each individual case.
But instead of identifying a specific, readily identifiable class that is affected, the classes in this suit are defined as any Google employee against whom Google engaged in certain classes of illegal discrimination in California in a given timeframe; this require litigating individual discrimination claims for each potential class member to determine if they are a class member. Since class members have to be identified and given a chance to opt-out before settlement or trial, this is impractical—its what a class action exists to avoid.
Compare to the Microsoft sex discrimination class action, which defined the class as all women employed in defined roles and levels in particular parts of the organization during a given timeframe.
Also, a class lead plaintiff’s claims—not just the law claimed to be violated but the specific manner—are supposed to be typical of the class; while it's very hard to make any guesses of what would be typical of such an ill-defined class, Damore’s case seems to all appearanced to be sui generis. Maybe I'm missing something, but the class action aspect here seems to be either a complete Hail Mary or a ploy for additional media attention.
This clearly is (or is going to be) a Demon Thread. https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/BZtAavpsy9WtMYgEL/demon-th... . People seem to be angry about what was said in the past, but don't agree on what was actually said or what those things meant. Attempts to clarify seem to mostly be throwing fuel on the fire instead. None of this is helping.
I think you're right. My instincts must be improving because something felt off after I made a few comments, and then I paged down a few times to here. And by a few I mean a few tens. I tried collapsing subthreads to get a handle on it, but it's really just a mess.
How else would several subthreads of subthreads report 40+ replies in an hour once the whole thing is collapsed? There be demons.
The worst part is that both damore's statements and actions are being dissected with a scalpel, by people who rear their legs at the mere implication they might not be 100% morally right.
Replace "white men" with "black woman" and they'd have a field day clutching pearls and fanning themselves silly.
Damore may be an insensitive autist... Or maybe he's one of the few sensitive to see through all the posturing.
> illegal hiring quotas
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.
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.
> (I assume Google is already doing this)
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.
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?
> 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)
Define "worse".
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.
So if you suspect your hiring process is biased the solution is to make sure it is by implementing quotas. Mhh...
Even if James Damore does not win Google has a number of practices that could be considered embarrassing if they were to be made public. I know a number of Googlers who confide to me privately about their experiences. Traditionally they would not have an outlet to express their grievances because no-one really cares. I'm hoping this lawsuit will give them and others a chance leak some of these practices. I'm interested in what people outside of SV tech bubble will think about it.
Could you describe some of these practices?
If there's any veracity to the lawsuit's claim that Google employees maintained blacklists of employees based on their political affiliations, or boo'd new hires on the basis of their skin tone, Google just handed Fox News an excellent ratings boost.
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 ?
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.
Google is the one shooting fire first by firing him needlessly
Damore wouldn't describe himself as conservative I think.
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.
Is that true ? I thought he describes himself as a conservative in the lawsuit. Anyway, my comment was a bit "tongue-in-cheek"
In the memo and court filings he is describing himself as a classical liberal. So, a conservative.
Damore’s lawsuit describes his memo as a defense of conservative ideology, so unless he was just playing Devil's Advocate with the whole thing...
He sometimes describes himself as libertarian. But he's no radical.
Imagine this going to the supreme court
presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with ‘boos’ during companywide weekly meetings.
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?
Yes sir. It's happened all over. Even at Github: https://imgur.com/7YaVYUx
Read the class action lawsuit, I found one example for this on page 44, lines 14-16, of the document.
My guess is he's lying about it.
Watching discovery occur on this case will be interesting.
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.
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.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...
James's legal team will try to argue why the arbitration agreement is unconscionable.
Most of the discussion here focuses on The Famous Document which I think is missing the point. TFD could be totally right, or totally wrong but the lawsuit is about wrongful termination and discrimination and has only remote relevance to the document.
Would be interesting to hear the opinion of the people with legal experience: what are the merits of the lawsuit?
My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination. Since white males are not protected class, the discrimination case is much weaker.
It is much easier for Google to settle this lawsuit than to deal with hundreds of others they would get should they kept Damore on payroll.
I think regardless of the merits of TFD this lawsuit is a good thing because companies would be less inclined to punish people for objecting groupthink.
>Since white males are not protected class.
Yes they are. Or at least whites and males are a protected class (at the suit alledges discrimination against these classes independently, not just their intersection).
It is true that the intent of the anti discrimination laws was to protect non-whites and females, codifying that into law would be a clear violation of the equal protections clause and make any such law unconstitutional.
>My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination.
The wrongful termination argument defiantly seems stronger here. However, it is worth keeping in mind that they have not settled yet. I assume Damore's laywers would have tried settling before even filing [0]. If Google wanted to settle they should have done it back than, before the PR hit of the suit being filed happened. Coming up is the PR hit of discovery, which is going to bring to light a lot of skeletons that Google would rather keep hidden. (Even if Google did nothing wrong with regards to this case; no organization the size of Google can go through discovery without something coming out)
[0] Assuming their actual goal is just money. They claim to be doing this to effect change. While their public statements on motivation are highly suspect, it is within the realm of reason that they are actually interested in this case for the political agenda, in which case they would want to take it to court.
Reading through the court document [0] makes me deeply concerned. Some of the stated actions, if they turn out to be true, are uncomfortable. I believe that in a modern society like ours, such discrimination should not be necessary, advocated for or considered in a healthy workplace. I do hope for Google that none of this is true.
0: [https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs-Google-C...]
"James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering..."
I have stopped reading TechCrunch, ArsTechnica and Vice magazine because they continually report this inaccurately (at best) if they are not outright lying.
Once again, Damore never says that women are biologically less capable. Nothing like this is every stated nor even implied. In fact he goes out of his way to say this is not so, in the memo. Frustrating.
Whatever you think of the memo, you have to be a little concerned about the precedent this would set if companies were not allowed to discriminate based on 'political' views. Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?
In California, by state law, companies are in fact not allowed to discriminate based on political views in hiring and firing. See http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
> Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?
Just like you should be "forced" to hire a Greenpeace member, or a union organizer, or someone outspokenly pro-choice, or someone outspokenly pro-life, or someone running on the libertarian ticket, or someone running on the Communist ticket.
How this would play out in practice if someone "brought their politics to work" and the case went to court, I can't tell you; I'm not an expert in California labor law. But if people aren't bringing their politics to work, firing people for political views would be an even more concerning precedent, to me.
(In Damore's case, the politics was very much brought to work, and not just by him. I make absolutely no claims about what that means in terms of the above-cited law, or morality, for that matter.)
Isn't employment in California in major big tech companies are titled at will?
At will employment makes it easier for both the employee and employer to terminate employment, but it doesn't exempt people from employment law. Companies can't outright refuse to hire people of certain races, religions, or genders even if they're at will. And in California, political affiliation belongs in that category as well.
And this is the crux of the problem with his lawsuit. Political views are not a suspect class in US law afaik.
What Damore may be trying to do is establish a legal understanding that the political discrimination (which definitely happened) was connected to racial discrimination (which would need to be proven in court). If Damore can do that successfully, he should be able to win the lawsuit.
But I don't think it's possible. At least it shouldn't be possible. Like you suggested, companies must be able to discriminate against political behavior at work that is disruptive.
Damore's memo was released in an unruly manner that disrupted Google's bottom line. It also brought down company morale, alienated fellow coworkers, and caused undue internal strife. His resulting unwillingness to help contain the drama demonstrated his lack of allegiance to the company's interest. Behavior like this cannot be protected from termination.
From my understanding he was getting death threats and misrepresented. He did the only thing he could do and try and set his name strait.
The person who leaked it to vox should be on the chopping block.
I agree that the person who leaked the memo against Damore's intent should be punished similarly (and I hope Google did).
However, the death threats and misrepresentations of his text were not simply a factor of it being published globally. From what I have heard, the discussion was already heated inside of Google before it even got leaked.
Also, I don't think Damore was ignorant to the fact that his content was divisive in nature. I think he knew exactly what he was trying to say and knew what kind of reaction it would provoke.
I really think he needs to own it, and the lawsuit just proves the point to me why he was fired. He's not a "team player"; can't own up to his mistakes. Sure, perhaps this lawsuit will make it easier for people to discuss politics in the workplace without being fired, but his actions telegraph his intent, at least to me.
Do not think this had anything to do with social politics. It was about getting along with your co-workers.. It was external forces that tried to make it into some social political thing.
Damore's lawsuit specifically claims he was being discriminated for his conservative political opinions. In his own memo, one of his bullet-point suggestions was "Stop alienating conservatives".
This has been about "social politics" from the beginning.
Companies can simply have a straight-edged policy of no politics -- from religion to economics, it's all off-topic and out-of-bounds.
That is illegal, according to California law.
It is illegal to prevent people from engaging in politics, in California.
This is not about politics. It is about basic human decency. There have been some that have since they to make it a social political thing. But the courts do not care about such things. You could never have someone like Damore on a team once they shared such an opinion. He should have kept it in his head. Why now nobody will hire him.
I mean, the law is the law. The person I was responding to specifically suggested making politics not allow at work.
This suggestion is illegal.
California law is extremely pro employee.
Actually California is very pro employer and maybe what you meant?
Google obviously has a lot of reasons to fire Damore but they do not even need a reason.
Former Google engineer sitting at home unemployed and unable to find a job supports he should have been fired.
Google can fire people for no reason, but that can't fire people for an illegal reason.
And google definitely didn't fire him for no reason.
It is illegal to engage in "Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office."
Here is the california law in question:
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
If there are smoking gun emails that say "We are going to fire him for his politics", then Google broke the law.
All this information will come out during the lawsuit, and during discovery, if it exists.
"Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics" sounds to me like a company can't prevent you from voting, or attending a political rally in your non-work time. It doesn't sound to me like a company can't make decisions based on your 'political' views, including treating you more or less favourably relative to other employees or candidates.
I put political in quotes back there simply because it's a word that can be bent in all sorts of directions to mean anything from Politics to simply having an opinion on something. Remember, the opinion might be highly offensive and make working with others, on a team, more difficult.
> Remember, the opinion might be highly offensive and make working with others, on a team, more difficult.
I'm no lawyer, but I don't see how this would make any difference.
Consider that a black man in rural Mississippi in the 1960s would have had a very difficult time serving white patrons at a restaurant; I don't think "people didn't like him working for us" is a viable defense here.
Are you from the US? In the US and CA you can be fired for basically any reason that a company wants as long as you are not a protected class which Damore is not.
But here it is so black and white on firing him this entire discussion is a bit ridiculous. The entire thing is some weird PR thing driven by the right wing.
Any company I am familiar with in the US would have fired Damore. It is also why nobody will hire him.
It is also why he now has his GF filter him.
Yes, I live in Arkansas. An employer here can legally fire someone because they have a bumper sticker on their car for the wrong candidate.
In California, however, political affiliation is a protected class under state law.
Practically, you can just 'let a person go' and not tell them its about the bumper sticker. CA is a right-to-work state, isn't it? Anyone can be laid off at any time.
> Practically, you can just 'let a person go' and not tell them its about the bumper sticker.
That's not what happened here, though.
> CA is a right-to-work state, isn't it? Anyone can be laid off at any time.
You're confusing "right to work" and "at will". "Right to work" means that it's illegal for a union to prohibit non-union workers. "At will" means that employers can fire people without reason.
Even in an "at will" state, there are protected classes under both federal and state law. Political affiliation is not a protected class under federal law, but it is under California state law.
You could do that sure. But if someone sues you, and you are required to give up your emails as per discovery laws, and one of those emails says "I fired him for being a Democrat/republican", then you would lose the court case and have to pay lots of money.
Google explicitly fired the guy for the memo. They aren't hiding as for why they fired it they explicitly gave the reason.
If you explicitly give a reason for why someone is fired, and that reason is illegal, them you will lose the court case.
Similarly, you could also find someone hiking in the woods, and just shoot them or something, and you might get away with it. Or you might not.
That's how the law works.
Google has been very clear as for why the guy was fired. Now the only question is is their stated reason equivalent to firing someone for politics. And if so, that's illegal.
I am not sure where you are at but in the US and CA you can fire someone for basically any reason they want. Say he farted in a meeting and he can be fired.
This is very different in the US versus other parts of the world.
But here it is pretty easy because ANY company I am familiar with in the US would fire Damore. It is just how things work in the US. You do not write what he wrote and share it. Might not be fair but how things work.
It is also why he is sitting at home and nobody will hire him. All of this has ZERO to do with politics and him being right leaning.
The issue has been cop-opt by the right wing to use it to gen up their base.
This is NOT a political issue as it appears you think. Writing what he did about women is NOT political. It is just human decency and something you just do not do.
Why do you think he now has his GF filter what he writes?
I literally just pointed you to the law in question.
It is illegal to prevent someone from "engaging" in politics, as per the California law I just linked you.
It is not legal to fire someone for "basically any reason" if it was for the illegal reason that I have linked.
Maybe what he did does not count as politics. You could make that argument.
But your argument about how it is possible to fire someone for any reason is untrue, as per the law.
If you ran a traditional company, and were interviewing a candidate who wanted to bring about the destruction of capitalism, would you hire them if there were equally-good alternatives?
Unequivocal yes. If I wasn't paying them to do that on company time, it would negatively impact their performance towards goals that were requested.
If they lacked the emotional regulation to restrain themselves then that would be a red flag that disqualifies them.
Would publishing and distributing a manifesto amongst your colleagues fall beyond 'restraint'?
I find this kind of funny...
The king of search finds it too hard to compile data.
http://fortune.com/2017/05/27/google-gender-wage-data-report...
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.
I think the reason was government contracts.
Is there actually any US law against discrimination based on political stance?
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.)
I don’t know about the US, but there is a California law against employer descrimination for expressing a political viewpoint
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.
Good job he wasn't advocating discrimination then
He'll have to explain that to a jury, and I've read the memo that claim is not abundantly clear.
Google will settle this long before it goes to a jury.
Argument by assertion, bold.
In California, yes
Could you please provide more detail?
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/can-you-be...
TLDR: yes, and there are certain exceptions, IANAL so not sure where this particular case falls
The Law is here (at least according to your link) http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
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.
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.
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"
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
It's not super clear to me that this would protect Damore, but IANAL.
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 like if any concept can't be fully realized in the size of a tweet people are going to just misconstrue it.
Read the memo before telling people what it said...
Twitter has eroded out society.
Just for once, I'd like a story like this to turn out positively. Not in that James wins or loses this lawsuit, but that something could be positively gained in his life from this experience.
Being fired from Google has been traumatizing. He's gone farther and farther into the "unrecoverable from a PR standpoint" zone, and that's really horrible. 10 years from now, he's going to have a hard time finding employment or basic living possible. He's still a human though. If he committed himself to being humble and actually trying to work on himself, it would be really positive. Even the PR thing can go away -- everyone loves a redemption story.
The problem is that moves like this just deepen the hole. A lot of people are cheering for his demise, and seeing that hole get bigger is eye candy. But again, he's still a human. He still has hopes, dreams, fears, etc., just like the rest of us. Maybe positive encouragement to change is a better route to go than just watching him keep digging. In no way do I support his ideas -- quite the opposite -- but is it fair to characterize someone as fully a lost cause this early?
> 10 years from now, he's going to have a hard time finding employment or basic living possible.
I just feel like this is a wishful thinking on the part of left. There are plenty of fields which do not care about his opinions. There are plenty of technological ventures who explicitly look to hire people who are 'uncucked' (term a recruiter used when reaching out to me) run by people HN and left in general absolutely hates (Occulus guy, Pharma bro, Peter Thiel). Plus the job of technology is such that as long as you're writing code, and pay taxes, you can make a decent living.
Not to mention the numerous developers blockchain industry hires, nearly nobody there cares about it, because majority of them are located outside US.
The technological right has money, and not everyone in technology needs to maintain an image like Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft etc.
10 years from now, he's going to have a hard time finding employment or basic living possible.
Given today's tight labor market, he has plenty of options. If he was good enough to get into Google, at the bare minimum he could do fine in corporate IT. In a lot of red states, his past might even be an asset. If he's willing to keep his head down and feign contrition, he could probably work just about anywhere except the top tech companies.
The right wing and egging him on did not help him. It probably contributed to him not realizing the mistake he has made.
Saw an interview with him and saying he needed to have his GF filter what he writes. I was thinking no that is not the issue. Instead do not share these things if they are in your head. Swear him saying that just made it worse. He clearly still does not get it.
He did nothing wrong.
He did several things wrong, and simply _stating_ that he did not does not make it true.
He did nothing wrong, and simply _stating_ that he did does not make it true.
Saw an interview that he now has his GF filter stuff he writes. Why do people that think he did nothing wrong think he now does this?
Obviously he did. Weird that is not obvious. But Google does not need a reason.
BTW, the fact that a former Google engineer is sitting at home unemployed would suggest he did do something wrong.
I think Damore's firing was more due to
1. The memo being leaked.
2. After being leaked, misrepresentations and even outright falsehoods about the memo being promulgated online.
Remember, the memo was being circulated within google for a month before his firing. This suggests that Google did not see the need to take punitive action against Damore due to the memo, but rather that it was the reception of the memo by the media that made Google fire him. Anecdotally speaking, most of the people I've encountered that read the full memo (as opposed to articles about the memo) think it wasn't worthy of firing.
I don't need to work at Google to know that circulating a memo at work about how your female coworkers are less qualified because of genetic factors is a stupid idea.
This statement was never made in the memo. The notion that it was stems largely due to point #2 in my comment above.
Because Google unjustly firing somebody is obviously impossible.
Google is a US company. In the US when someone does what Damore did you get fired. It is just how it works. It might not be fair.
It is also why Damore is at home unemployed. Nobody would hire him.
I think part of the confusion on this matter is employment is very different in the US versus many other parts of the world.
In the US and CA you can be fired for farting in a meeting.
We'll see if the courts agree with you.
He can get a job at a semi-big software company, that is not trendy, maybe in the midwest or in any other country pretty much, he might not make SV-pay, but surely can still pay his bills.
Maybe this will even lead to something good for everyone, like more ethical diversity practices.
The merit (or lack thereof) of his claims and views matter little in this case. The case is visible enough and touches on politically relevant points enough so that there will be tons of people on both sides willing to fund this case all the way to supreme court. Then there is the problem with how damaging discovery would be to the company. It will probably will get settled fast, with Google paying him a few years worth of salary and a non-disclosure clause that will make him never speak publicly about the episode again. Unless the guy gets too greedy and push for too many figures, then it will be a shit storm.
It simply comes down to money.
Damore was fired because he was bad for business. Not because he's white, male, conservative, or the contents of his memo. Had the memo not been leaked publicly, I have no doubt he'd still be working at Google and his memo ignored and/or forgotten. He simply became too much of lightning rod for Google to continue to employ him.
Google will settle for the same reason. It is better for business to pay him off and make sure he never talks about it again, than to drag this out.
The only people who will be financially better off in this whole deal will be the lawyers, and nothing will be resolved in reference to the larger issues surrounding this case.
He was fired for going against the "feminist" narrative that dominates Google.
Spot on.
I wouldn't be surprised if his intention is to take this further than just a settlement. There's a great deal of social momentum pushing for Google to be accountable for this whole debacle at a larger scale than that, and Damore is positioned to play the hero archetype on that front.
Legitimate question here, how is it ok for all the screenshots of internal tools which the authors must have assumed would remain internal to Google to be put into this publicly visible suit? Their names are visible and not redacted?
Is this just a reminder to be careful what you post at work?
Generally good work advice: assume every internal email or slack IM you send might one day be read out loud in court.
I feel like this study published in july 2017 is very relevant: "Sex differences in brain size and general intelligence (g)"
link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...
Abstract Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes.
Highlights • Sex differences in brain morphology and general intelligence were examined.
• MRI and test data of the Human connectome project were used (N = 896)
• Males and females differed in total brain size, gray, and white matter volumes
• The male-female difference in general intelligence, g, was d = 0.25.
• Sex differences in brain morphology mediated the sex difference in g.
Do we really need to rehash the whole phrenology period of our history?
wait so a correlation between brain size and "generral intelligence score (g)" is phrenology? don't you feel like your mispresenting the study?
Phrenology was used to justify pre-existing racism.
All these studies that show that men are naturally more intelligent because their brains are larger amount to the same thing, but racism is out of vogue, so let's use it to justify pre-existing sexism this time.
If 3 women published a scientific paper with the conclusion, "girls rule, boys drool," you wouldn't feel at least a little suspicious of the authors' intentions?
do you believe that the authors falsified their findings?
and also the idea is not to justify sexism, but to provide another possible reason for why a trend seems to perssist after apparent bias is eliminated. This is in response to the idea that oppression is somehow responsible for 100% of the gender-ratio gap.
I don't claim that biological reasons are the only reasons but I stress that they do in fact exist and that a violent response to suggesting that they might exist is not normal.
To use this studies to be sexist, is the wrong idea ,as the memo's author explained, because there is overlap between the populations and while on average one is better (in that respective function) then the other, that does not preclude that someone from the second group is better then someone one the first.
In other words, the result on hiring based on merit alone is better then both: - hiring only males - hiring based on prescribed gender quotas.
and by the way, there is studies that indicate that woman are better at empathy ( a sign of emotional intelligence): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
Are there (in part) biological reasons for the differences in behavior between men and women? Clearly there are sociological differences. Damore clearly did not separate the two ideas or their relative impact on the issue, which led to the enormous amount of publicity.
The idea that the tech industry needs to change their approach to incentivizing women to the workplace still stands regardless.
I think this lawsuit is a sign that Google's management miscalculated. The last thing they wanted was for this issue to drag on. They don't want to be on the front lines of the culture war. They want to build great things and make piles of money.
"...employees of Google who’ve been discriminated against due to their “perceived conservative political views by Google"
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?
In California, yes. See section 4 of:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
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.
Yes, yes it is
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...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.
He did not publish it. It was published without his consent. It was supposed to be private.
I'm not saying he did. In fact, I have already mentioned in another thread here that the leaker was wrong.
However, code of conduct at Google basically doesn't want employees marginalizing other employees. That is what Damore did.
Exactly. You have to think of everyone including the women and be difficult to have him on a team after he wrote the memo and shared his feelings.
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"?
The lawsuit says he was discriminated against not only for being a white male but also "discriminated against (i) due to their perceived conservative political views by Google".
Discriminating against someone for their political beliefs is not illegal. Federally political affiliation is not a protected group and in California apparently 'political affiliation' is according to wikipedia[1] however I couldn't find the relevant section of the CA statute on the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) of CA[2].
If he was discriminated against because of his race or gender, then that is a problem. But firing him for having conservative views should be entirely valid. I am not saying that believe firms SHOULD fire people who have X view or Y view so much as they should have the right to.
While we can debate the merits of James' individual views, let's take a more extreme example. If an individual regularly spouted off white supremacist and neo-NAZI views, I don't think any of us would have a problem with a firm firing that co-worker. Firms are trying to create a culture that aligns with their objectives and enhances employee/workplace happiness and harmony. Some views are antithetical to that.
Furthermore, we can back away from such extreme views and still find cases where it would be legitimate to make decisions based on individual's views and perspectives. If you owned a company focused on selling sustainably sourced, carbon neutral products. Hiring a sales person who does not believe in climate change and is actively hostile the the concept of environmentalism would be a bad idea. It is entirely logical to hire/fire people based on non-religious beliefs.
Beliefs are choices individuals make, and thus they should be judged by their choices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160909163923/http://www.dfeh.c...
>Discriminating against someone for their political beliefs is not illegal
In Cali it is. These laws were enacted in the 30/40s when people were blacklisted for being Commies.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
It would be interesting if this goes to the supreme court and the conservative court rules these laws unconstitutional on freedom of association grounds.
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.
>openly published a memo
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."
This will probably come up.
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/can-you-be...
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.
The analogy is flawed.
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).
Of course the analogy is flawed. The analogy I was replying to is even more flawed. ;)
Didn’t he publish it only privately inside Google?
Are White Men really booed during company meetings?
I think this is maybe what the suit is referring to: https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950452593565798400
The person in question is talking about what they presented at a meeting, but I don't think it should be interpreted that the booing actually occurred during the meeting itself. In any case, it's not really the best look, but the suit is mischaracterizing it IMO.
I hope he does not settle as a matter of principle.
I agree. He needs to lose on the merits and walk away with nothing.
I wonder if there should be a court that decides what is ethical and what isn't (according to the prevailing view of the society) as opposed to the current system where all you can do is try to right wrongs or punish actual harms to society.
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.
> Will watch this with interest AFAIK discriminating against conservative white men isn’t illegal.
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.)
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.
> No one is making the argument that Google discriminates based on race or sex.
The third cause of action of the filing is literally "workplace discrimination due to gender and/or race in violation of FEHA".
In California, workplace discrimination due to politics is illegal [1]
In USA, discrimination due to sex is illegal.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. What you said is factually correct and relevant to the story.
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.
Damore's name will now go in the history books along with such luminaries as Allan Bakke, Cheryl Hopwood, and Abigail Fisher.
I wonder how much evidence google has of people who were pissed off by Damore's memo.
Cause really, that's all it should take. "He made his continued employment here impossible because he pissed off his coworkers". Sounds like a completely valid reason to fire me.
Is Damore responsible for the failure of some of people in managing their own emotions? "He's saying things we don't like! Fire him!" That doesn't seem valid to me.
> Is Damore responsible for the failure of some of people in managing their own emotions?
That line of stoic reasoning really justifies anything though. Like, my co-workers should manage their anxiety just because I like to work with a firearm strapped to my chest and 2 grenades on my desk.
Anxiety over close proximity to explosives seems justified. Anxiety over somebody stating ideas you simply disagree with doesn't.
There are disagreeable ideas that nobody has anxiety over though, so it's not just that.
But I think you can see that too. If you assume his ideas are correct:
1. His letter becomes well received, my employer changes their hiring policies
2. The current gender ratio was propped by non-gender-neutral hiring practices, without them, that will change back in-line to the base rate
3. My job is in danger
Is anxiety over losing one's job justified?
Or, another line:
1. His letter is well received, but my employer doesn't change their hiring policies
2. My co-workers now think that I have my job not because I earned it but because of the non-gender-neutral hiring practices
3. My job is in danger
I can produce more, but at the end of the day they all threaten either status or jobs, so I don't fault why people would defend their interests with all their effort.
Being anxious about losing your job doesn't justify getting somebody else fired. Specially through vile means such as character assassination.
Edit: Besides, those same arguments apply against the diversity advocates. They openly claim that white men dominate the industry because of sexism, that they don't hold their positions because of merit but because of bias. They're guilty of the same crime they accuse Damore of committing.
I will agree that getting someone else fired for your own benefit is deeply selfish, but I also expect people to fight for their own interests when livelihood is on the line. And a job is closer to 'food on the table' than 'new discount TV on black friday' (it's closer to the bottom of maslov's hierarchy).
Citing peer-reviewed research about gender differences is not even remotely equivalent to openly brandishing explosives in an office.
Yes, but both result in a failure to manage one's emotions. The implication I think you're making is that if others are insulting you, you should control your emotions, if others are physically threatening you, it's understandable if you fear for your life. But the biological reality is that both produce amygdala responses and strong emotions.
Also, calling it "citing peer-reviewed research" is sort of missing the point. How about "politely and scientifically insinuating that some of my co-workers wouldn't be working here if it weren't for social programs at the company" which can be taken for insult. The validity of the research is besides the point.
So no, Damore is not responsible for people not "managing their emotions", he's responsible for not forseeing that people would not "manage their emotions". As in, he should have known better than to insult people at work.
Going back to guns, some people like to make demonstrations where they open cary in a Starbucks. They mean no harm, they're within the bounds of the law... but they're either counting on people to freak out to create media commotion or they're obtuse.
> peer-reviewed research" is sort of missing the point. How about "politely and scientifically insinuating that some of my co-workers wouldn't be working here if it weren't for social programs at the company" which can be taken for insult.
The author did no such thing - at least not without the caveat that their rejection would have been a false negative, which negates any implications about these co-workers abilities. And taking steps to reduce the false negative rate for diverse candidates is a pretty standard practice in bay area, see this past comment of mine for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953762
Other commenters have chimed in saying Google has similar policies, and the company openly states on their careers page that they're an affirmative action employer. If making a factually correct statement about the company's hiring practices is an insult, then it'd be prudent to rethink those practices.
Yet the author's memo was not taken very well. People aren't rational, the media is a page click machine, and all nuance is ultimately boiled down to a headline. What should we expect, that people are perfectly rational spheres?
I'm aware this line of thinking is like "blaming the victim" for non-neurotypical people who don't know where the line is. It's not a great situation all around.
"I won't work with someone who thinks I'm less capable because of my genitals"
sounds a bit more valid to me.
So they have no problem working with Damore then since he never said such a thing.
If everyone in Google is getting outraged over something that is debatable and that much of the population agrees with, isn't that a sign that Google is kind of in a cultural bubble, an echo chamber? If Google is striving to be a global, multicultural corporation, shouldn't it be allowing of a diversity of thought as well?
I didn't say everyone was outraged.
You don't there are women at Google who say this memo as yet another attack on the idea that they are just as capable as their male counterparts?
He got crucified because he didn't make anybody laugh -- now he will be paraded around as a poster boy for the alt-right or w/e. Aren't autistic traits highly prelevant in programmers? Isn't it also true that those traits will show up much more often in men compared to women -- a token factoid curtesy of wikipedia. Also anecdotally, how many male devs do I know that started hacking at 13 -- a lot. How many women? Personally none, but I know colah from Google Brain is one example, and a rather extreme data point too -- at the extreme end of the scale it's irrelevant anyways, a successful female comp sci prof or a female researcher will be picked. Unless there is some extremely good reason like Google drained all the capable men already out of the ecosystem there doesn't seem to be rational reason to explicitly optimize their hiring pipeline for the wrong demographic -- maybe they don't optimize it like that, but a lot of people have the perception that they do which will get you the same result in the end.
Update: one moment this gets up voted and the next moment it gets down voted and this repeats, is anybody willing to actually argue? Call my bs, I have thick skin.
Why does the right wing embrace Damore instead of being pissed at him?
There are people that might generalize and think all right wing people feel this way about women.
I have right wing friends and know that is not true but others might.
Instead Damore has become some kind of right wing matre which seems really strange.
The most fascinating part of all of this is who thought up making it a social justice issue? Gen up the right wing? Also it is really that easy to manipulate them?
I mean we have an employee who does not work in HR and I do not think a manager working on something that has nothing to do with their job. Something people are fired for everyday.
Then on top is negative no matter how you look at it towards other employees that makes it impossible to keep and have him on a team. Double firable offence and Google would be wrong not have.
Then it is freaking California where the law is in the employer side.
But somehow it has become some weird rally call for the alt right and the abuse of white guys which I am actually am one of.
Someone should write a book. It is just insane how easily some are being manipulated. But there must be something deeper inside that makes it this easy that for some reason I am missing as a white guy.
Why do we have angry white guys? Why not me?
Go for it.
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.
Kind to have to be a right wing organization he is not working along side of women. You do have to think of everyone on your team including the women.
> not working along side of women Women able to read and comprehend at high school level would have no problem working along side him.
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.
> have been found watching (racial) porn at the office
pretty sure we don’t want anyone watching any sort of porn at the office
A fool and his money are soon parted.
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.
Google's PR Nightmare? Honest question: Don't you think that the one with the PR nightmare is Damore?
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.
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.
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
Yes from a certain angle it's a PR win/win. However if he actually pursues a lawsuit with his money he's with near certainty going to be the loser.
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.
I suppose if it's crowd sourced he has no choice but to tilt at windmills.
If I was the firm I would. For google's intended audience it's basically free advertising.
thank you hacker news randoms for telling me what my opinion is on james danmore because with my finite and trivial amount of wisdom I cannot possibly be depended on to form my own thoughts of a classic white racist screaming about how oppressed white hetro males are in a social culture shaped by 1000 years of white dominance roll-eyes
a social culture shaped by 1000 years of white dominance
Every culture is shaped by the people it's comprised of by definition. Do you have a problem with the fact that Chinese culture is "shaped by 1000 years of Chinese dominance"?
As a white male, good for him
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Also, we ban accounts for race war, which this arguably is.
Brace in for the brigading. I'm flagging this article because it always results in a bunch of trolling rather than any substantial discussion.
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.
You're flagging an article because you predict trolling? Does that mean that you expect HN to never be used to discuss potentially divisive news?
Granted, this submission appears to be softkilled due to the flame war detector (which is unsurprisingly/unfortunately what's happening)
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?