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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

If I were to tell multiple co-workers to their face that they are inferior to me, I would be fired. This guy told a very large amount of his co-workers that they're inferior to him, and he posted it all over the Internet for everyone to see.

You'd be hard pressed to find a company where leveling personal attacks against your co-workers isn't a fireable offense.

Freedom of speech isn't the same thing as freedom from the consequences of his actions. All it means is you can't be jailed or executed for it. You are not entitled to have people continue to have you in their lives.

Furthermore, his employer has a right to freedom of association, and they have chosen to exercise that right by ceasing to associate with him.

If this is authoritarian, than I will proudly call myself an authoritarian. Perhaps Hobbes was right after all.

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> This guy told a very large amount of his co-workers that they're inferior to him

That would be very disturbing, but that's not what's written in the document. Saying that there are average differences between groups, and that therefore people should be treated as individuals, is not at all like saying that all individuals in one group are inferior to another.

Everyone is saying that they are open to discuss this, but as soon as someone says what they think about the paper they are met with dismissal. People interpret his large focus on the biological traits of women, by presenting those traits as the primary cause of the gender gap and without showing causality between those traits and the gender gap as disrespectful. Because it suggests that women are primarily at fault. That he inserted a few disclaimers and tries to avoid responsibility by saying things like "possible" doesn't really make things better but further the feeling that he didn't really care to what degree it was true.

Yeah, I agree. He went too far in that direction.

I think he was wrong on some facts, and also didn't explain things in the best way.

But I think it was wrong of many people to misrepresent what he said (as "women are inferior"), and it was wrong of Google to fire him.

I think it was wrong to fire him too. But honestly it somewhat of a feat to manage to criticize large parts of the organization, make a large part of the company angry and end up on big news sites, all at the same time. Especially since Google is pretty infamous for their hiring process, keeping things internal, flagging troublemakers and protecting their reputation.

> people should be treated as individuals

thankfully, google hires individuals as individuals, and google employees are exceptional and meet the requirements of the job they are hired for, in spite of the average of their community, and in spite of the supposed problems of diversity programs.

You did not read the memo. He did no such thing. If you really think there is one passage in there that states that, please cite it.

> This guy told a very large amount of his co-workers that they're inferior to him, and he posted it all over the Internet for everyone to see.

It was an internal memo, which someone else leaked.

Whoever leaked that memo was not fired though.

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