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Comment by groupthinkqmark | Hacker News Reader

This is not a workable argument against firing someone. If it were, all you'd have to do is say, "We have too much group-think here," followed by any egregiously awful statement, and you'd be insulated from consequences. That's just not how these things work.

I think any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims. Regrettably for him, I don't think there's much to most of it.

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The truth of what he said has nothing to do with why he was fired. He was fired for not being politically correct and offending people, not because his arguments were right or wrong. People are usually most outraged by statements which are true or close to true but which they do not want to believe.

No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.

differences

Differences that cause someone to be less qualified are called "weaknesses".

But that is only because you did not study psychology in which case you would know that most things in that manifesto are scientifically proven and what he said does makes sense for women AS A GROUP not individually... :/

> No, we're mostly offended by ideas that are false and actively harm people - like the entirely unproven notion that women suffer from biological weaknesses that make them less likely to be qualified as engineers.
All good, except he did not make that argument or anything similar to it. He did not state that women inherently suffer from biological weaknesses of any sort. And no, his ideas did not harm anyone (except perhaps indirectly himself). Literally nobody got hurt except him, he is the sole victim of the ordeal.
I hope that you have read the document in its original form, which is a PDF with some (admittedly weak) references.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...

Except the fact that people who study the field tend to agree with him on most things: http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...

> ...any good argument against firing him has to hinge on the truth of what he said besides the group-think claims.
It's hard to see a fair and general principle underlying this. People who publish false or mistaken things internally should be fired?

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