Fired Google engineer James Damore is giving his first major interviews
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
I read the fateful memo (which has been labelled 'toxic rant' and 'diatribe'). I was discussing it with my partner who is a nurse.
As you probably know - most people who work in nursing are female. Is that because of 'gender stereotyping' or 'biological differences'? Are women just naturally drawn to the caring professions?
What I find especially interesting is that this topic is now being discussed in scenarios where it wouldn't normally be talked about...
As I said...this one will run and run...
[edit: originally included Stefan Molyneux in my defense but having taken a look it seems he's started putting out much more alt-right content].
Disagreement with the prevailing orthodoxy is one thing - I'd like to hope there's no one here who fails to see the value in honorable, substantive dissent, even from an orthodoxy with which one strongly agrees in general. The trouble with Molyneux is not that he dissents, but that in doing so he fails to display either of those meritable traits.
Alt-right means white nationalist, and it shouldn't be confused with civic nationalism, which is something altogether different.
And if you believe in something "your enemy" also happens to believe in doesn't mean you are on a thin line. The World doesn't work that way, propaganda, especially political does on the other hand.
Guardian have a piece I was reading this morning saying is was a 'sexist diatribe against women in tech'. Maybe I am reading the wrong memo?
My opinion of Guardian went down quite a bit yesterday. They are frequently pushing an agenda, but their reporting of this was pretty dishonest (I had read the original before I read the Guardians interpretation).
Everyone sensible knows there are group differences between sexes.
Most humans are bad at distinguishing group differences from individual differences.
If people are widely aware of the group differences, they'll do stereotyping and apply wrong logic to mistreat people. Or even right logic to make the best guess in the absence of other information, which turns out to be consistently discriminatory and harmful.
So we shouldn't say much publicly about the group differences. Keep it quiet among intelligent people for the public safety.
I don't like that at all, but that's how I think the popular lefty opinion works.
That's not the point. The point is he is chalking up gender employment ratios to biology. Meanwhile, there are many socialization factors he is completely ignoring.
This is an ancient debate, nature vs. nurture, the oldest in psychology. It's been going on for centuries, and perhaps millenia, not just decades.
And, the irony is, that by arguing the cause is biology, he may be adding an additional socialization factor. Women may see this guy speaking out and decide not to work at Google because of it. That's socialization, not biological.
Or non leftist women feel they can work there. Or are all women leftist?
(Holds up hand.)
If I said all human beings were born with 8 fingers and 6 toes and am dismissed from my biology class for it, was it because I had a dissenting opinion?
[edit] I'm genuinely asking, I've not seen a source for the original memo so all I've heard is second-hand info.
It sounds like you have read the whole thing, though. Would you mind calling out some relevant quotes, so that I can get a better sense of his points on the subject, and retract my earlier statement should it prove unfactual? Thanks!
It is actually quite interesting to try to understand... What brings a person to make a statement such as yours, without having read the material in question..? Would the same person (you) also comment on how much he/she likes or dislikes food before having tried it? It seems to me this is not about having a "busy week" but a completely different view of truth, what is "right" and honestly when to talk and when to listen.
I dont mean to continue bashing you, but your comment was such a clear and ironic example/display of what I think is a very big challenge for western society these days.
Can't speak for any other person or any other case. But, here, I relied on a secondary source who has built a reputation with me for veracity even on contentious topics such as these, despite that he and I disagree on just about every prior in the world when it comes to matters of this sort. Unfortunately, he has disappointed me here, and I've thus made a factual error in an earlier comment which I have since acknowledged in a sibling thread to this one.
I'm not sure what effect that's likely to have on the whole larger point about Western society that you're trying to draw here. Seems like a lot of stew from one very small oyster, especially considering you're coming with this at a gay man who spent an entire day's worth of HN participation, a few months back, arguing that gay marriage is a bad idea both for the individuals involved and for the state. Came out net karma positive on it, too, which I found surprising. But I think there's a great deal in my prior commentary here that would surprise you, had you but bothered to look before you went running off on whatever this tangent is about how I'm an example of everything that's wrong with Western society, or I'm privileging my individual opinion of how things must be over the facts of the matter, or whatever.
If you want to talk about irony, how about the irony that inheres in making exactly the same mistake against which you inveigh when you see me make it, having incidentally failed to notice that, by the time you got around to trying to set me up as some kind of example of a failure in society as a whole, I'd already seen the error called out as such, requested substantiation of the counterclaim, received same, and clearly recognized that I'd erred? That seems pretty ironic to me!
I think this is getting a bit OT. Again, sorry if you felt personally attacked. That was not what I was after. If you take a step back from the posts and just read them for what they are... maybe you could see that it is a pretty good example of the drama we see around this. The Google VP of Diversity made (imho) quite a similar comment in her statement as you did. She did, however, not detract it as far as I know.
Would you like to separate the point you're trying to make from the ad hominem with which you first sought to make it, and try again? Perhaps you have something of substantial merit to say on this point, and perhaps you do not. Either way, conflating it with some kind of sideswipe at what you imagine to be the person of your interlocutor does not help you make your case - especially when, as I suspect may be true here, you're trying to argue in defense of intellectual honesty. What do you imagine it helping, to make such an argument in so flawed a fashion as this?
James gets accused of something that he really didnt write and people refer to things that are grossly misinterpreted or just plain wrong and clearly not in the actual document (in more general terms the characterizations could be described as lies or misrepresentations of the truth as per my original comment). Just as your attempt to explain why ge got attacked.
A clear difference between your comment and many in this drama is that you retracted your statement and the VP of Google didnt (afaik) and that is good on you! But I never talked about you as an individual in the first place so thats kind of irrelevant to my point. You can call it "unfair" of me to single out your first comment and not your retraction, but again my point wasnt to judge you as an individual. It was to show how that specific comment (partly out of context) was a good example of what is going on.
If you want to say that a you think a lot of people have taken quotes tendentiously out of context, or just deliberately misrepresented Damore's statements outright, in order to support ideologically driven and tendentious counterclaims, then say so. I'm not about to disagree with you on that - in my judgment, one of the reasons our society is so badly broken these last few decades, and just barely limping along in a state where one good solid crisis could well bring it down, is because lies have gained such ubiquitous and unassailable primacy over truth.
How do you think it helps you make an argument like that, to tie it to a failing comparison between the dissimilar actions of a pair of people approaching the issue from totally disjoint perspectives and with totally dissimilar intents? More to the point, what effect do you think that has on everyone else who tries to make arguments similar to yours, but with the good sense to base them more firmly than you have done here?
I think you may not be aware of, or may not take seriously enough, that this is a situation where, because we're arguing against a strongly held and ideologically driven mainstream opinion, we each have to expect to be taken as pars pro toto by people who aren't interested in reasoned discussion toward joint identification of the most useful course of action to follow - but rather in making us out to be the most absurdly overblown, unserious, and hateful assholes they possibly can, the better to render us mute and unable to participate in public discourse. That's why "alt-right" means "Nazi" now.
When you make sloppy, shitty arguments like this, calling out personalities instead of parsing ideas and basing your statements on ad hom instead of anything that merits being taken seriously, you make life a whole lot easier for people who would like to define "we should treat people as individuals" as "secretly hates women and wishes he could still own slaves".
If you're going to continue to participate publicly in this kind of argument, from this direction, then you need to hold yourself to the highest of standards, because believe me, there are plenty of people out there who will use any deviation therefrom to paint you as every kind of monster in the world. If you can't or don't care to do that, then the best thing you can do to help advance your cause is to stop participating in public at all, because doing it as poorly as you are here hands a weapon to those who have no higher goal than to make us all regret the temerity which led us to question the prevailing orthodoxy. That weapon doesn't just work on you. It works on all of us. When you do this, you make that much higher the bar we all have to clear just to get a fair hearing in public, and for no good reason in the world. You should stop.
Someone asked whats up with this James guy.
You answered with something that was completely false and even clearly contrary to what was written.
(You admitted to this.)
I pointed out that your original misrepresentation was similar to what others do in this very drama. E.g. the statement from Google VP of Diversity attacking James. I also said I didnt mean to bash you any more (since you admitted), BUT that your original comment was an interesting example/illustration of something bigger.
You obviously took offense.
I tried to explain that I was talking about the comment in general and not you as an individual. I also said Im sorry if I offended you. But the fact remains that your comment was a misrepresentation of the memo that was similar to e.g. how the VP misrepresented it. Although you actually did it more explicitly than her.
If you cant extract yourself as an individual from this observation you will probably never get it. If you think Im an idiot, thats ok.
No doubt a similar time sink as checking the discussion on 3-4 pages on HN.
Having now read it, I can immediately conclude that James Damore is very new at this, approached it under the assumption that the social and political context around the matter was susceptible to mere reasoned discourse, and really had no idea of the minefield into which he so blithely strolled.
Someone a bit more seasoned, for example, would not have included the "Possible non-bias causes..." section at all. On the one hand, it's not as well supported as it might be and "evolutionary psychology" in particular is a great big pile of unfalsifiable hypotheses. On the other and much larger hand, that section is just chock-full of material for the kind of tendentious, misrepresentative quote-mining that's a go-to tactic for those who so believe in the righteousness of themselves and their cause that they find no dishonesty too mean to deploy against someone with the temerity to dissent.
I can also immediately conclude that I did indeed perpetuate a misrepresentation from a secondary source, and I greatly appreciate 'abnry and 'beaconstudios bringing my attention to the error. In future I'll try not to make the same mistake again.
That by me is the really galling part - despite that he's still deeply committed to the progressive ideology, he's struck me as a generally accurate observer and honest reporter until now. I'm both surprised and disappointed to discover he is not reliably so, and that I'll henceforth have to source and backcheck him with the same care I'm accustomed to using everywhere else. Which is fine, but...I don't know. I suppose I have a hope or two pinned on the guy possibly being open to the kind of good-faith-on-both-sides reconciliation that's going to have to start somewhere if there's to be a chance of resolving the current political polarization in a marginally civilized way. In particular, his recent comments on the subject of academic ostracism of political dissent, and how that's a terrible idea both ethically and pragmatically, have given me a strongly favorable impression - and since he's a lecturer at CUNY, that he should say such things seems to me to count for a considerable deal more than when a mouthy unlettered redneck such as myself, for example, does so.
I don't know. Maybe he just slipped, too - he's on vacation this week, so perhaps he just didn't look into the matter as closely as he should've, same as I didn't. But it's a little discouraging all the same.
Check out this graph from the paper: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DGsHRXlXcAARj6E.jpg
Frankly it is one of the more concise and effective presentations of this point I have seen. It had been removed from what Gizmodo originally published.
Shit exists, insanity exits, people can and will say what they want - doesn't mean every thing that's said needs to be addressed without regard to anything else.
You seem strongly convinced that there is nothing more to be said beyond your own apparently firmly held view on this subject, and I respect that. However, it appears this view is far from ubiquitous. Does misrepresenting and insulting those who do not share it seem more likely to convince them than ignoring them does?
So for you, validity of views has corelation with how many people hold it? I guess we can call that absurdity and stop?
Let's be adults and have a conversation.