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>I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said.

It's worse. They don't care for what you've said, and they don't particularly care about the issues they talk about either.

Some (media people, etc.) use the issues to have a career or an audience. At best, they convince themselves they care, but they don't in any real capacity.

Others use the issues to vent their frustrations from their lives (as a religion substitute and group signifier) and as an excuse to fight with people.

Others are just repeating what is in fashion in their circle (progressive or conservative) and use the issues as a tribal thing.

(And I'm talking about people on both sides of the spectrum here).

Extreme leftism is literally a religion, so much so that you can't even present scientific evidence that is contrary to their decided narrative.

Born Again/Woke

Transgression/Microagression

Heresy/Dissent

Sinner/(Racist, Misogynist, Bigot, Sexist)

EDIT: Original Sin/(Privilege, Unconscious Bias)

They even follow the same behavior pattern. First they declare you a Sinner. If you've done research they question the motive of your research and claim it is invalid, regardless of its content. Like the Church burning those who tried to prove the Earth wasn't flat or the center of the solar system, when presented with evidence the extreme left says, "Heresy!"

Then they want to be protected from the sinners. The sinners make them feel unsafe. They have to be taken care of.

Seriously I thought humanity got past all this religious nonsense.

We have strides to make in better treatment of women and minorities, but adopting this kind of religious attitude is ridiculous and not the way forward.

Thank God that the US is a place where for whatever reason people inherently seem to not like following the rules.

Don't forget that they recently created a concept of original sin: unconscious bias.

Thanks to the Implicit Association Test, it can now be demonstrated that everyone has racial bias. If you point out that follow up studies have shown poor test-retest reliability and that there are all sorts of other flaws in this field of research, you'll simply be dismissed as a denier.

So now, implicit bias takes the place of original sin, with white European (even the ones from Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with slavery) slaveholders standing in for Eve. You can never get rid of original sin, you can only ask for Jesus to forgive you. So who or what will be the new secular left wing Jesus?

The mob.

This is quite humorous. Can I use this?

Of course. Just be careful where you post it, you might get added to a naughty list somewhere.

When we ask users to take care to post civilly and substantively, this is what we want to avoid. The ratio of insight to inflammation doesn't meet the bar for the kind of thoughtful discussion we're after here.

I will concede the post could have been more civil and I apologize.

However, it is extremely substantive, an entire doctoral thesis could be written on secular religions/orthodoxies and their illiberal and authoritarian nature and is directly relevant to the discussion of the reaction to the Google memo.

Substantiveness and civility aren't unrelated: a lack of the latter undermines the former. A doctoral thesis would be expressed quite differently, for example.

Yes substantiveness and civility are related. However, making a point in 500 characters vs. 20,000+ characters lends itself to some brusqueness.

I agree however, that lack of civility can undermine your argument. See the very uncivil comments below from Damore's fellow Google employees, including managers. They undermine their argument and literally create a toxic and scary work environment.

I abbreviated the names, but these were all public statements. I just don't want to run afoul of any HN rules regarding naming names.

CB: "You know there are certain "alternative views, including different political views" which I do not want people to feel safe to share here... You can believe women or minorities are unqualified all you like — I can't stop you — but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what's coming to you. Yes, this is "silencing". I intend to silence these views... Take your false equivalence and your fake symmetry, and shove them hard up where the sun doesn't shine."

KB: "I am considering creating a public-inside-google document of "people who make diversity difficult"...which calls out those googlers who repeatedly made public statements that are unsupportive of diversity... Things I'm still pondering: should inclusion on the list require something resembling a trial? should people be removed after some period of time if they start behaving better?

CW: "One of the great things about Google's internal communication mechanism... is that, as a manager, I can easily go find out if I really want to work with you."

KE: "Your reply...ignores the many women Googlers who have expressed the frustration they feel as a result of this. F* off. Thanks for using your real name here, though. Makes it easier to update my spreadsheet."

What's more scary someday people like Larry and Sundar will step down. Then these people will have all the Google's power.

I agree that this comment wasn't _quite_ as substance based as many others in this thread, but I think it made an interesting comparison that I hadn't seen elsewhere. I've read the same thing said a hundred different ways in other comments and this one said something different. It's possible that this could be interpreted as uncivil, but It seemed _relatively_ politely put and I think the fact that it's a different perspective is reason enough for its existence.

> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"

"What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism."

Amen to that.

There is the freedom to negotiate, and the freedom to leave. Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects the millions of people who genuinely suffered and died under Stalin.

OP's quotation is not speaking of freedom generally, which you are; it is speaking of freedom within the corporation, i.e., you are there and you do not leave.

>Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects

No, making a comparison of abstract forms of government is not in any way disrespectful to people who lived under a regime. It can only be construed as disrespectful if you are looking for an emotional tangent to distract people reading from the argument at hand (which, incidentally, indicates that you know your argument is bad!)

By exercising your freedom to negotiate and threatening to use your freedom to leave, you can attempt to cause changes in the corporation.

Please don't attempt to tell me that I know my argument is bad.

>Please don't attempt to tell me that I know my argument is bad.

I didn't attempt to tell you that, I did tell you that.

The freedom to leave gives you leverage within the company, even if you don't leave. Imagine how it would be within companies if the government forced people to stay.

Effectively this is what Utah's new non-compete laws achieve. You won't leave if you can't work at another company in your field.

Yes, the top calls all the cards. Yet, it is still a human organization, with all the features of a human organization.

As to answer. Inside a corporation, there is as much freedom as the top allows. With the consequences of that emanating from all the levels, so it is wise to not make it entirely freedom-less.

> Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time

Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?

> How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?

Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s

Sad!

I was downvoted! Sad!

Made me laugh

Plus the fact that the 140 characters are done from a soapbox with possibly tens of thousands of people ready to pounce on it.

This is like complaining that our mouths can only make 1 word sound at a time.

How can you have a nuanced debate with a serial device? It just won't work.

Whenever you have a discussion about a topic in which people feel personally invested, their reasoning skills drop and their sentiment analysis ability goes up.

I've noticed that. But it does appear that for a lot of normally rational people this personal investment is at least amplified, if not manufactured almost entirely through the media.

A "normally rational person" is a person that is emotional at least 50% of the time but convinces themselves otherwise. Facts that seem to go against a person's beliefs provoke cognitive dissonance - it doesn't matter how technical they are or how logical they need to be to do their jobs.

It goes beyond that, Sabine Hossenfelder is better than a "normally rational person", she is seriously very smart it is in her bones to make a decent rational case for whatever she is saying. And here I am talking about her blog posts, not her job -- I have never read any of her papers.

But in this case though, she is does repeat some interweb fallacies about the memo, even though she has certainly read it herself and thought about it for herself.

But she does get the important thing right: which is that even if the memo is as bad as she says it is, it's still no reason for a sacking.

[Disclamer: I am a Googler, but quite obviously I am not speaking for the company here.]

Is that what the PC police told you to put at the bottom of all your online posts? ;)

Explains the sloppy reasoning of the Google Memo perfectly.

> I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here".

I guess they did not consider the voting booth to be private, as SV is one of the areas that swung towards Clinton?

Hard to say what the actual numbers are, but from the anecdotal evidence, a percentage of people felt that they had to pretend to be politically correct / leftist liberals. If you multiply any percentage, times the 80 million people in California, that's a lot of mental anguish and repression.

As long as there's food and shelter for most, things will continue as they are. First little bit of suffering, and it will explode into revolution. Normal way of things.

> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"

For further reading on this topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?

Can you indulge me in a thought experiment. You seem like a reasonable human being but I think your question shows that you may have fallen into a moral trap.

Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point.

If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation?

If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view.

The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this subject that gets to you in a way other's don't, and why?

You might find some serious answers, but probably more questions here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...

You make excellent points and are, logically speaking, correct. We are emotional creatures and we usually respond emotionally. If the list was called "hitler is my hero" there would be a visceral reaction. The framing, the contextual anchoring of a comment does matter and it should matter since we are social creatures that respond emotionally.

I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.

I like the downvote I got. It reinforces the point I made about humans being emotional creatures!

> Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question.

The idea in your comment is that you can't, or at least are dissuaded, to express certain opinions. Most the things I hear about Google, including the existence of a list talking about the harms of political correctness, that the author felt free to write such a report and many other reported freedoms at work indicate that this isn't the case. That in fact people at Google are more free to express themselves in these types of issues than at other companies.

You're the one who seems to be upset. I wrote one line and you jump to conclusions, question my motives, dig into my comment history and even managed to bring up Hitler. I try to argue the facts. Maybe you should question yourself as you question others.

They might not be feeling so free to express themselves since this guy got fired.

There's a lot of questions here

- did he create the group?

- how long had the group existed before he posted the memo?

- was Google as an organisation ok with that group existing?

- is there anything wrong with there being discussion surrounding the value of PC viewpoints?

- What other sorts of lists exist at Google, and what sorts of viewpoints to they cover?

Any group like that is surely an HR honeypot, either by design or ex post facto.

It's fascinating to me that Google even has places to express opinions. When I was in my 20s and 30s, the workplace was just the place where you did work. There was no room for self-expression. You worked, you got paid, you went home. Seems like it opens the door for trouble - a false sense of individual rights when there are very few.

Google and the like greatly benefit from creating an environment where work and the workplace can be all consuming.

So, what are the odds that Damore read this thread and immediately turned around and wrote his essay? Note the Chomsky quote and use of "heresy".

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)