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> Irrespective of the original memo, and this is something I've felt more strongly in the past couple years, it's just not safe to share dissenting viewpoints in tech anymore.

It is not safe to share your viewpoints anywhere where it is not considered germane: and the workplace is high on that list. A firm will fire someone who becomes annoyingly political or who makes a public ass out of themselves on social media. I work for a medium sized tech firm in the American South and we had one engineer that was very open and sometimes combative about her progressive viewpoints and people stopped wanting to talk to her, even those who agreed with her. She didn't last a quarter.

Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.

part of the problem is that the organisations themselves have become extremely political. Google is known to be a very left-leaning company and I can imagine that working inside such a political organisation, especially one that talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven, would cause one to want to express their views.

> organisations themselves have become extremely political

This is not true if only for the fact that organizations have always engaged in politics. In one of the worst cases, the United Fruit Company lobbied the US President to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala. In one of the most benign cases, Subaru sponsored gay pride events and publicly supported LGBT groups in the 1990s.

Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.

organisations have always been political, but the current political environment inside tech is at what I would consider to be an extremely high point. Politics right now are extremely divisive (I think much more so than say 10 years ago) and many tech companies have openly picked a side. Yes I am familiar with the UFC, and have read about their involvement in various Caribbean nations and the whole "banana republic" concept.

> Besides that, everything else you've said is useless hyperbole. Get your history together before you go spouting nonsense.

Why be so hostile? If you want to be a dick to strangers on the internet then piss off back to reddit.

Feel free to point out which of these two statements is useless hyperbole:

> Google is known to be a very left-leaning company

> [Google] talks a big talk about being logic and reason-driven

Everything else I said was conjecture.

> Expecting firms to give their employees a forum to speak openly about anything not work related is a recent phenomenon across the board, and many still hold onto the view that if you want to engage in political discussions then do so outside of the workplace.

But Google does this (Memegen and eng-misc), the problem is that you're only able to speak about certain things and entertain certain opinions...so naturally, conservatives will feel muzzled and want to not go against the dominant culture/power structures

>> It doesn't even matter what you write because most people won't even read the original source

I have to wonder if the artificial urgency that social media has created doesn't have something to do with this. Everyone these days wants to be the first to respond, which results in a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. You end up with a giant, unstoppable snowball of knee jerk reactions to other knee jerk reactions rolling down a bottomless hill.

It doesn't have to even be a politically charged opinion btw. Holding opinions like "let's not refactor this module right now" when everyone else thinks it's a great idea can quickly get you marginalized.

Unfortunately, not everything has an objectively correct answer (aesthetics! ethics!) and so what you are saying kind of reinforces the point that diversity of viewpoints is vital to group problem solving. A group with the same blindspots will all make the same mistakes.

That is so beautifully ironic.

"All hail diversity! But if don't think like we do, GTFO."

This was only ever true in online discussion forums, Usenet, etc.

I agree that there is a lot of mob mentality going on, it’s just difficult to get upset about this case because the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments. Twitter replies are mostly full of men who didn’t read the original memo or who are willfully pretending it didn’t claim women are less biologically suited to being engineers.

I like Pichai’s memo and I think it sets the right tone: the offending employee could have raised these same arguments without falling back to debunked stereotypes. He could have done an hour of Googling on the topic and educated himself. Instead he trusted his own feelings in an area he had no experience or knowledge in.

This seems to be a trait relatively common among really smart people: doctors who think they’re good at politics, mechanical engineers who think they’ve discovered a theory that overturns all of physics, or in this case a software engineer that thinks he knows better than thousands of scientists doing experiments and crunching the actual data.

As far as I can tell we can have rational critical discussions in tech - we just can’t get away with spouting nonsense. If that nonsense reinforces old sexist or racist stereotypes then we can expect a backlash.

> the original author was spouting debunked “biotruth” arguments

C.f. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956592, where an actual scientist is quoted to say "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right."

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger... for plenty of good references on the topic.

But generally, I mean, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I don't expect to see peace over this topic any time soon.

I think the best way to summarize the memo is that he quotes a bunch of science, which is true.

He also makes a bunch of unfounded claims that aren't really related to the science. And people argue that because he said a bunch of sciency things that scientists agree are correct, that everything he said was true.

Please provide a quote from the article that is a 'debunked biotruth', just one will suffice.

The guy did have a degree in the sciences...