James Damore has an above decent chance of winning his legal case against Google
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
> The labor-relations law usually applies to union organizing, says Wagner. But over the years the act has been more broadly interpreted to protect employees who discuss their working conditions with each other. That might include Damore's memo, Wagner says.
> Damore says he also plans to invoke a California law that bars employers from retaliating against workers who complain about illegal working conditions. He doesn't have to prove that his working conditions were illegal, Wagner says. Instead, she says Damore's lawyer might argue that his memo was protected under California law, because it related to allegedly unequal treatment of employees.
Citing a law that was put in place to protect union organizers seemed weird, but I guess it makes sense if there is precedent for interpreting it in speech not explicitly related to union organizing.
Arguing that Google retaliated because he made allegations about unethical/illegal corporate behavior seems like a much stronger case, since he literally did make those claims in the memo.
Damore said Google policies "lower[ed] the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate"
That statement is (a) factually inaccurate, you can't lower the bar by descreasing the false negative rate, and (b) slanders his colleagues hired through that policy by saying the bar had been lowered to allow them in.
You could argue that the word "effectively" means he actually meant something slightly different in point (a), but he still made the claim in point(b).
In fact, depending on the circumstances, it's mathematically accurate. See for example, my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14987168
In the original memo, that statement also linked to an internal Google discussion to back up his claim - which presumably detailed what he meant. That's context that we are all missing. It would be interesting to see what that discussion was about.
> (b) slanders his colleagues hired through that policy by saying the bar had been lowered to allow them in.
No he didn't. He talked about reducing false negatives, not increasing false positives.
It seems we have a different interpretation of "lowering the bar"
If he had said 'hiring practices which lower the bar for “diversity” candidates', then I would agree with your interpretation.
But he didn't say that, he said 'hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate'.
It's an inaccurate interpretation of his comments to leave off the last half of that sentence, and I'm not sure what other way you can interpret 'by decreasing the false negative rate'.
The "bar" is an approximated objective assessment of ability, not an assessment of someone's ability percentile... as demonstrated by the fact that Google policy hires 'people that pass' rather than 'top x% of candidates' or 'top y% of the population according to some measure'
To reframe the "bar" as being a percentile is inaccurate and excuses Damore's misleading and inflammatory terminology.
IIRC he mentioned this in his interviews with both Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
You state:
> Because of that and because of Google's standards, let's say that only 25% of all candidates have the skills and qualifications necessary to work at Google, which breaks down to 5 women and 20 men.
> Once again assuming a normal distribution with neither men nor women over or underrepresented in skill level, then without any sort of correcting for diversity, candidates would need to be in the top 10% of all candidates to receive a job offer (10 / 100). , this is 2 women and 8 men, leaving us with a false negative rate (i.e. people skilled enough to work at Google but who get declined) of 3 women and 12 men.
So if there 25 candidates who technically meet the requirements. But Google has a sorting process that is able to pick the best 10 of those 25. Why are those 15 considered a "false negative"? I would've thought a false negative would be when Google's evaluation puts someone who should be in the top 10 somewhere in the lower 25. Maybe it's semantics (and the generally complex problem of defining job qualifications and evaluating candidates). But I also wonder if such ambiguous/unoptimal hiring results are the fault of the job requirements. That is, could these requirements be tightened so that there's just 20, not 25 possible candidates to filter from.
(None of the above questions likely has anything to do with Damore's memo).
But back to Damore's memo. You think he isn't slandering colleagues because he's just stating how the mathematical distribution works out. Whether it involves decreasing false negatives or increasing false positives, isn't the real-life result the same? Given female Google employee hired in the same cohort, the likelihood that the female was let in because of lower standards (i.e. the top 3 of the bottom 15) are substantially higher than that she was hired for being among the 2 women of the top 10.
In a standard cohort, there are 3 women who have been hired who wouldn't been hired if Google hadn't stuck to non-diversity-prioritized system. That doesn't imply that at least a few women lucked out for being women, and not because of merit?
My understanding is that if you take positive as being offered a position and negative as being denied a position, and true or false as whether that was a correct decision then you have:
True Positive - Someone who was offered a position (positive) and who was suited for the position (the positive assessment turned out true).
True Negative - Someone who was not offered a position (negative) because they were not suited to for it (the negative assessment turned out true).
False Positive - Someone who was offered a position (positive), but who was not suited for the position (the positive assessment turned out false).
False Negative - Someone who was not offered a position (negative), but who would have been suited to the position (the negative assessment was false).
So those 15 are considered false negatives because they were not offered a position despite being qualified for it - e.g. perhaps there were only a limited number of positions, and the cut had to be made somewhere.
> isn't the real-life result the same?
Not quite. Increasing false positives is saying those people were given offers but they were not qualified for the job. Decreasing false negatives is saying they were qualified for the job and were picked ahead of other also qualified candidates.
> That doesn't imply that at least a few women lucked out for being women, and not because of merit?
When put like that, then relative to other applicants in the cohort yes, but not because they lack the merit to work at Google - and the latter is what many people were claiming he had stated, and what I was trying to refute.
I can see how the former could also upset people, but if the claims he makes about priority queues for diversity hires, and reconsidering sets of candidates if they are not diverse enough (but not the other way around) are true, then it's not so much that he's claiming people are unqualified, rather he's pointing out a mathematical consequence of those hiring decisions. Insensitive? Perhaps, but to the level worthy of all the internet drama it has caused and to the level of being fired in such a public fashion? I'm not so sure, especially considering many people seem to have misinterpreted what he was saying - both in this and his other statements.
The media and the echo chamber it feeds is, once again, to blame.
So we want to ban open discussion now? "Have a complaint? Tell HR! But be careful cause if it's the wrong type of complaint we'll very publicly fire and shame you!"
>So we want to ban open discussion now?
Can you make a larger strawman than that? I don't know.
You removed all context from the situation with that quotation and are representing it like it was some absolute.
All I got from the document was him questioning entrenched beliefs about diversity.
Thats barely the end of the world
Just associating the term to James Damore is ridiculous. A couple weeks ago, Linda Sarsour called Jake Tapper a member of the alt-right for criticizing her.
It's become a meaningless catch-all term for the left.
Sure. Here's an example from this week: http://i.4cdn.org/pol/1502213891937.png
"Conduct yourself in an honorable manner. Shouting things like n[...] and k[...] just turns normies off and makes our movement look bad. If you have to condemn someone, call them 'anti-white.'"
Literally the literal alt-Right is suggesting that instead of insulting people for their own race just because you don't like them, you should use "anti-white" as an insult, ascribing racism to them, whether or not it's accurate.
> This event does not exist so you can get your rocks off punching antifa.
("antifa" == "Antifascist Action")
They are concerned some of their attendees want to get into fights with anti-fascists. For fun.
Which died out very suddenly once Trump was voted / in office, which means either Reddit coincidentally updated its algorithms right then, or the online marketing / propaganda agencies called it a day.
This guy, by any measure of the imagination IS A PROGRESSIVE.
That's why, I think, the left has just created a few million more "rightists": leftists that feel personally attacked. Even within Google where rightist viewpoints are few and far between.
That the memo was not addressed and discussed by Google management prior to it going viral after being available for several months is no ones fault but Googles. Especially after he specifically forwarded it to Google's diversity department. That company executives are publicly demonizing him and essentially validating his complaints in regards to the silencing of alternative view points is not a forward thinking move by the company.
Looking at the percentage of computer science degrees being presented to women which currently stands at less than 15% of the total, he may be on to something. Or he may not. For a company to insist on a goal of having a percentage of its workforce comprise a gender ratio higher than that of the available market of engineers means that they would have to be giving women preferential treatment. This appears to be forcing the issue and cannot help but discriminate against men. It's simply math.
I'm not arguing for or against the validity of their approach but to deny that Damore has a legitimate axe to grind, opinion and legal case is not a valid view point.
Also, I guess you could call the statistical points about bimodal distribution "hair splitting", but that's just taking sophisticated statistical discussion off the table entirely.
The word diversity used to encompass all forms of diversity, including diversity of ideas. At some point in the last few years it was rebranded and narrowed in scope to be only include gender, gender identity, race (except white people), sexual orientation (except straight people), muslims (but not christians).
His definition of diversity is broader than what those on the far left have narrowed it down to.
Somewhere along the way using race and gender as proxies fell along the wayside and those characteristics became the goal of diversity.
I read the memo and I'm not sure how you can overlook how sexist and demeaning the memo actually is. I'm talking about content that is front and center starting on page 3, under the heading "Possible non-bias causes of the gender gap in tech". Specifically content like...
> I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.
Right there he's asserting that there are less women in technical leadership roles because biology. That's an asinine assertion and it's insulting in a pretty aggressive way.
> Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality traits becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.
This is also pretty insulting to everyone who has been the victim of sexism in the workplace, during a performance review or while interviewing for employment. We know that sexism in software engineering is a real issue, yet here the author makes a sweeping dismissal.
From here on the document simply gets worse and worse. There's the backhanded assertion that maybe men are in leadership because they don't value a balanced life and strive for status. There's the bit where he talks about how the work itself needs to be changed to be more social. And on and on.
Remember that people aren't asking for software engineering itself to change, they are simply asking for fair and even-handed treatment despite their gender. That this person feels that, in fact, fair and even-handed treatment despite gender is unreasonable is, in fact, deeply upsetting to a lot of people (myself included).
Many have tried to make the argument that he's saying something different, but I'm hard pressed to find that in the actual memo. For sure, he's talking about how maybe the gender gap in technology can never be truly eliminated and yes, I agree that may be a goal we never achieve. But he's also arguing that maybe we shouldn't bother, or maybe we should carve out a specific niche of work for a specific gender and that's unacceptable and insulting.
Should he be fired? I don't know, nor care. But he's not being persecuted for his speech. He embarrassed his employer publicly and suffers the same consequences that you or I would for doing the same: he's lost his position.
They're called person-oriented vs. thing-oriented preferences. One of the biggest smoking guns I've seen is the study on prenatal androgen and occupations. [0] It shows a marked difference between women born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) and more typical women. This suggests very strongly that male sex hormones in utero affect the development of the brain in a way that orients the person towards things/systems rather than people.
Perhaps something like this does have an effect on some level, although I think the effects are small and variance in the population is always larger then people think. Even so, it shouldn't be used as an excuse to simply accept status quo and avoid taking any steps to try and close this gender gap.
Sexism was a big problem for women who entered fields such as law and medicine back in the 60s and 70s. In spite of all that, women are now extremely well-represented in those fields. You're making the claim that sexism is the primary reason why women are underrepresented in engineering. That's not enough. You should be able to show how sexism in engineering is fundamentally different from the sexism women faced in those other fields in order to explain the difference in representation.
On the contrary, I'd ask you what makes software engineering so special that it wouldn't fall into this historic pitfall.
So what is the difference?
I took from the memo that he disagrees with the way Google implements racial and gender quotas as opposed to hiring people based solely on a persons technical skills. I feel that he is seeking to explain the gap in the number of female engineers using what he perceives as a biological basis. If this is biological difference is true or not, I have no idea.
I don't see where he states anything along the lines of that men are all better engineers just that there are more male engineers and possible reasons for this. He appears to feel that artificially inflating the ratio via deliberate selection is not the way to go. There is absolutely a gender imbalance in computer science but it starts before the hiring process, less than 15% of CS graduates are women. Why this is fact I don't know but it is.
My overall takeaway was not that he was advocating for discrimination rather it was quite the opposite that everyone should be judged on their own merits based on individual abilities, not on the perceived abilities of gender or the need to meet false quotas that in turn discriminate against others. Good policy does not pull people down to the lowest level, it should lift all to the highest levels.
I do understand your concern regarding sexism though and absolutely agree it should be stamped out at every level. People should be judged on who they are, not what they are.
I don't think anyone is arguing for lower standards and that this idea, in itself, is sexist. It's not that standards need to be lowered in order to get a larger amount of women into the field. It's that the sexism in the field, which is pretty well documented, needs to be eliminated. I think that is the goal that Google is working towards and I think it's a valuable goal. For sure, it will not be achieved overnight. If there aren't enough women software engineers, well, they'll have to wait for them to appear. The demonstrated need for these software engineers may encourage women to enter a field they might have deliberately chosen to avoid.
The tone of this memo, to me, is poor; my first thoughts were condescending and smug as well as unabashedly sexist. In my opinion this poor tone could be one of the reasons people are so upset, or angry, at the author. This effect is directly working against Google's goal of trying to hire a more diverse group of software engineers and maybe that's why the memo's author was let go.
> If you write a document that becomes such a public relations nightmare that it requires the CEO to cut short a family vacation to deal with the mess, update your resume.
(http://www.joeydevilla.com/2017/08/08/one-pragmatic-lesson-y...)
It's not a law of nature, so it's not the same as "you ran with scissors, dude".
I'm concerned that the takeaway will be, "If you anger the employment gods, you get smote. That's the way the world works."
This last paragraph left a bad taste. Does everything need to be about politics?
Trump is clearly not ideological, do calling him right wing doesn't make sense either. He's not going to, out of principle, decide he doesn't have the legal ability to do something he wants.
We obviously need a different political metaphor. I don't know if are ready for one though.
Being a Marxist/anarchist manifesto and being backed by science, economics or political philosophy aren't mutually exclusive. I don't view the memo as common sense - that's not to say it's incorrect, but I don't view it as common sense.
I'm not acting as though it's right-wing babble; my point is that I am against people saying that Google has a left-wing bias, when it's hard to imagine that positions which are core to the left wing would be accepted at Google. As such, I'm not making a comment on the content of the piece, I'm making a comment on the culture at Google which is supposedly 'left-wing biased'.
More than politics, it's the present tense that's bothering me. How long since the US left has focused on worker's rights?
And how many votes did they get? While I agree it's a stretch to call the Democrats 'left', at least on economic issues, things like worker's rights have been neglected by the voters and the national conversation as well.
This is what happens when people start throwing around the phrase "the personal is political". Social entropy in the West seems to be turning skyward asymptotically.
Just like it would be interesting to point out that a virulent anti-semite hired a Jewish lawyer to defend them... which the press did quite often.
(Not comparing Damore to an anti-semite or anything, just using an example)
He's quite clearly not a staunch capitalist ideologically - a staunch capitalist would simply say "Google has the right to hire whoever they want."
He described himself as a classic liberal in the memo. That ideology places significant emphasis on economic freedom. One cannot be a "classic liberal" without also being a staunch capitalist, unless you find capitalism itself too restrictive and reject the label.
A lot of the current conservatism and populism shares similar impulses with the left-wing of 100+ years ago.
If you bring >1 people together in some way, shape, or form, you will have politics.
His memo is very firmly left-wing and liberal though, hardly an 'extreme'.
> the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ and sex differences)
> Stop alienating conservatives: Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
> conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
> I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation
> Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture
> which makes it clear why it’s a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians
> Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices
> Google’s left leaning
> Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
and that Google should change its hiring practices to improve this, instead of ethnical or national diversity.
And he makes up more pseudo-scientific arguments for why Google should hire more conservatives:
> conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
In the context of his memo - where he states that Google is too far left-wing - the recommended changes are obvious: Hire more conservative. He also recommends to track the political affiliation of all existing employees to track the diversity gap there:
> I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation
This is the same kind of affirmative action that he criticizes just a few paragraphs before.
If you have evidence that diversity has a positive impact on company performance and you have two candidates who other otherwise exact equals except one is a woman/conservative. Is it affirmative action to choose the under represented option?
I don't think it's affirmative action rather its just good business sense. I consider affirmative action to be the hiring of a group who is perceived to be discriminated against, simply because of that discrimination.
Affirmative Action, or illegal discrimination, is given when a company bases its hiring decisions in any way on anything but the employees merit. If age/gender/race/political beliefs/religious beliefs/etc have any influence on the hiring decision, it is illegal discrimination.
And he argues similarly, that affirmative action in any way is bad, and Google shouldn't do it - then he argues again that Google should do it, but only for the benefit of conservatives.
"treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group"
Check.
"Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races."
Check.
"[Our programs] can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination."
Check.
So he is 100% on-board with the German definition. Google's existing programs, OTOH, are not. They would be illegal in Germany if the definition you've given is correct.
The only thing I can find in his "Suggestions" for the "benefit" of conservatives is the following:
"Stop alienating conservatives"
"We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves."
Wow, stop alienating a group of people and allow them to speak. That's just horrific. Off with his head!
Actually for some reason I interpreted as "Stop alienating conservatives", but clearly there is no where in the article where he alludes to this, well except for a few dozen times.
It starts with "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes.", and has many suggestions on how to increase diversity (not just viewpoint diversity), all ideas attributed to the left†.
†I feel compelled to mention I find that left/right are woefully inadequate labels, and serve better as a tool to divide and conquer people so they don't unite on common interests. But they work well-ish enough in this case, and a discussion on this would be long and orthogonal to the topic at hand.
Edit: Reading your other reply, it seems you think any action at all done to increase diversity is affirmative action. That's not what's usually meant by the term.
I quote several paragraphs from the memo where he argues specifically for that.
"Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors."
When he, in a centrist document, puts up arguments for and against both side, you only selectively quote the ones for the right and against the left.
That is dishonest and so incredibly transparent that I wonder why you bother. Even if your goal were to discredit him with your dishonesty, it should be obvious that you won't achieve your goal, only damaging yourself in the process.
[EDIT: I don't know his personal political views, so edited to say that the document is centrist]
Quote me a single argument from the document that criticizes the right, at all.
I've given a dozen quotes criticizing or ridiculing the left from the memo.
> That is dishonest and so incredibly transparent that I wonder why you bother. Even if your goal were to discredit him with your dishonesty, it should be obvious that you won't achieve your goal, only damaging yourself in the process.
It's dishonest of you to claim he has a position when he only criticizes one side, and always defends and supports the other.
"A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others."
Just above that he has a table of "left biases" and "right biases", and both are equal in length.
But yes, as a centrist who thinks that Google has too many left biases, he criticizes those left biases more.
Which is something else that he states explicitly:
"Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google’s left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I’ll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that’s required to actually discriminate to create equal representation."
Many people can't visualize this concept, so we can take the political compass as a helpful tool: https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/us2016.png
What's not OK is simply dismissing and ignoring his analysis, treating it as if it didn't exist, and then misinterpreting the rest based on that.
I'll try to illustrate it for you:
I say "I love books so much that I have my entire apartment covered in bookshelves, with books three levels deep and it's still not enough, books are littering the floor so I can't walk and can't clean up any longer. I think I need to get rid of some books".
So say you disagree with the first part. Say even that you are correct, that I had made some fundamental mistake and there were actually bookshelves I hadn't considered and if I only cleaned up and used them I wouldn't need to get rid of any books. Is it then OK to just remove that first part, only cite "I think I need to get rid of some books" and then conclude that I must hate books because I want to get rid of them? I think not.
(And no, he didn't argue that he wanted to get rid of anyone, just to clip that potential willful misinterpretation)
One of the axioms of free society is one of fairness and equality.
Any argument that suggests a treatment should be applied to group X, but not to group Y, is therefore automatically invalid.
Any argument that suggests that a group should be treated differently because of a group tendency is automatically invalid.
Anyone who disagrees with this disagrees with the most fundamental axioms of modern society. Yes, I realize there is an ongoing revolution happening of people that feel that this axiom is wrong, and they should get an advantage over other groups, but I disagree with that fundamentally.
This is an axiom held even higher than the constitutional rights any country grants, as all those derive from this axiom. The reason so many people are angered by actions of both the left and the right is that they feel that this axiom is being attacked.
Exactly. So you are 100% in agreement with James.
>Anyone who disagrees with this disagrees with the most fundamental axioms of modern society. Yes, I realize there is an ongoing revolution happening of people that feel that this axiom is wrong, and they should get an advantage over other groups, but I disagree with that fundamentally.
Again, that is exactly what James is saying, and I have quoted him a number of times now whereas you have not provided a single instance of him saying the opposite.
If you think he is not saying that, then what we have is disagreement in analysis.
On a more meta level, you seem to think that because you profess adherence the correct beliefs, the right "Axioms", you are freed from the burdens of proper analysis. I remember that very vividly from my classes at Uni in Germany, for example an essay writing class where a significant number of my fellow students thought that they would be graded on the "correctness" of the opinion they had penned, rather than the quality of the essay. So they handed in essays that were absolutely embarrassing. "Gesinnungsästhetik"
I would suggest the following exercise for you: take an opinion you absolutely disagree with. Then write an essay supporting that idea. Make it as good as you can. Then write another one tearing it up. Then another one tearing that one up.
I am? "You need to have conservatives to have a balanced view, hire more of them" (paraphrased from the attract more conservatives part) isn't something I've ever said.
> On a more meta level, you seem to think that because you profess adherence the correct beliefs, the right "Axioms", you are freed from the burdens of proper analysis
False. But I think that if you disagree with society on the base axioms of it, you should leave it.
By your argument, you should be able to rally in the streets and protest for allowing child cannibalism, too.
It's just an opinion, too, nothing wrong with it. If people want it, we should just let them.
No thanks.
There are certain moral axioms a society is based on, if you disagree with them you can leave. (For example, the German constitution has an eternity clause, making some basic axioms of society immutable for eternity)
That's not "paraphrased". You just blatantly made that up. What he actually wrote is you should not silence them.
> if you disagree with society on the base axioms of it, you should leave it
So why don't you?
>By your argument, you should be able to rally in the streets and protest for allowing child cannibalism, too
By your logic, you should be able to commit genocide and we should have to applaud you for it.
See, I can also make up shit out of thin air.
>There are certain moral axioms a society is based on
Yes, such as non-discrimation. Which is what he writes:
"treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group "
"Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races."
"Discriminating .. is misguided "
Anyway, stop with your moral outrage based on nothing but yourself. If you see horrible things everywhere, but can't actually show any of them except by "paraphrasing" (i.e. making shit up out of thin air), maybe the problem is with you, not with others.
I'm not the one going against all of society by holding a fringe opinion.
> See, I can also make up shit out of thin air.
I didn't make shit up. You said any possible statement should be discussed logically, there should be no opinion that we should disregard just based on axioms, as that would silence parts of the political spectrum.
> Yes, such as non-discrimation. Which is what he writes:
And yet he says that having conservatives is something that is a value just in itself, and that Google should strive to have more conservatives.
I'm not making shit up out of thin air, that's specifically what he argued.
Or what purpose does the paragraph praising conservatives so overly awesome mental abilities, and he paragraph saying that having people from all political spectrums is a value in itself, serve, if not as a call to action?
He is specifically calling for more conservative employees at Google.
Hell, he specifically called for registering all democrats and conservatives at Google.
Are you seriously that ideologically blinded that you can't see a political discrimination when it's staring you into the eye?
You can be pretty far out and still see the guy two steps farther out as dangerously deluded.
Neither is anything that would support him being described as a “centrist”.
"Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors."
This is exactly a centrist position.
Now you can reasonably argue that on balance the document isn't centrist. I think you're wrong, but reasonable people can disagree.
That there isn't anything in there that would support a description of centrism is trivially false.
To paraphrase
> Autistic men have the fast-twitch OCD neurons that make them ideally suited for programming.
The tone of the language is nice, but the Wikipedia citations remind me of my time teaching high school five years ago. Anyone who wrote a paper without citing in a significant way five scientific sources (google scholar provides free pdfs, how awesome is that?) got an automatic zero.
Wikipedia has good information but it's hardly what one would want backing themselves up for something like this.
I hope some day we find a way to return to an era where the media focused on their overall reputation instead of pushing clickbait as hard as possible.
The person you were replying to was referring to the "continuing PR + HR nightmare inside Google." The public reaction was a problem but the damage to morale and the culture of the company was, one assumes, considered a much bigger threat by management.
If a case goes through and has a concrete result (as opposed to a settlement + gag order) it has a high potential of being a landmark case of one sort or another. It's difficult to say what that will be, though, because the details matter a lot and it will certainly be more complicated than any simple sentence will accurately capture. The findings and final judicial opinion matter too, not just the binary outcome of the case. I mark the "some reason related to this matter" with [1] above because the case itself will also be deciding what that reason ultimately was; none of us currently are capable of guessing what that is and I guarantee you your knee jerk will prove an inaccurate indication of the final judgment's logic.
(And let me emphasize explicitly I've written this post generic to the outcome of the case. Either major outcome could be a landmark case depending on the reasoning given by the court.)
And to how many leftist podcasts was he invited?
"The news" is far from an editing unbiased reasonable discussion. They completely misrepresented his views already, there is absolutely zero reason to believe they would give him a fair chance to represent himself.
Excuse me, what? Is Google still considered a startup?
If he had hired a good lawyer, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing him doing interviews and tweeting images of himself wearing a T-shirt comparing Google to a gulag.
No, I'm pretty sure he just wants attention.
Based solely on VikingCoder's "T-shirt comparing Google to a gulag", the characterization will be of a disgruntled worker who didn't care about his job and felt like burning all his bridges before leaving in what he thought was a blaze of glory.
His actions after the firing could easily be explained away as hurt feelings for trying to be open and honest, and being publicly shamed?
* it's not the defense I suppose if he originated the suit, but you know what i mean
Something like half the citations are to Wikipedia. There are five actual scientific papers there, three or four of which don't even support his thesis, and, if I recall correctly, many of which are in the Wikipedia citations, the classic trick of a rushed undergrad who needs trustworthy citations but has no idea how to find them.
There are some people who are "mad as hell, and ... not going to take this anymore", so write such essays to 'prove' that they aren't wrong, the company wrong.
For that matter, there are some people in romantic relationships who do the same.
I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, I'm saying that this is what Google's lawyers will argue happened, so a good lawyer would advise him to not make things easier for Google.
* the word you want is 'plaintiff' as this would be a civil suit.
Did the T-shirt predate his sacking?
While those who just want to roil the ant's nest, do.
That's how Google's lawyer's will portray him, which is why a good lawyer would recommend not doing that.
That sounds reasonable.
> If he had hired a good lawyer, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing him doing interviews
People who hire good lawyers don't do interviews? That's some stretch.
5.1 White privilege
5.2 Feminist postmodernists – the Oedipal pathology
5.3 Cultural appropriation
5.4 Neo-Marxist postmodernists and 'identity politics'
This: If he had hired a good lawyer, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing him doing interviews
Is a pretty baseless statement. It's also not what he said.
This: If he had hired a good lawyer, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing him doing interviews and tweeting images of himself wearing a T-shirt comparing Google to a gulag.
Is a pretty good point.
He did.
This is who filed the complaint on his behalf. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hastings
Clients, of course, can ignore good advice.
http://mattbruenig.com/2017/08/10/the-trump-nlrb-will-smash-...
He walks through all the relevant points, concluding:
"In basically all cases, a conservative NLRB will want to reduce the ways workers can coordinate with one another, and increase employer discretion to terminate employees. When I raised this point on Twitter, someone said that this might be different under Trump because wouldn’t such a ruling feed into the political correctness and whatnot that he hates. And to that I can only laugh: at the end of the day, what conservatives want to do is shift power to bosses over workers, and they are really good at keeping their eyes on the prize."
One thing you learn quickly in law school is that you win cases not on the law but on facts, or rather your characterization of the facts. A good lawyer presenting facts in a way that they get through to a carefully selected jury can win almost any case that's based on a legally plausible claim.
Also, Google will most likely offer a huge settlement just to avoid the negative publicity and embarrassing disclosures that come out during the discovery process (which in many cases may show further tortious conduct towards third parties and expose the company to further liability). The case doesn't need to be strong, rather just painful enough for Google to defend. Every suit has some nuisance value.
Furthermore, Mike Godwin himself says that you should make comparisons to the Nazis when warranted. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...
Tomorrow the alt-right will be marching in Charlottesville in support of actual literal neo-Nazis who call themselves Nazis, and claiming that they share a common enemy with the neo-Nazis and will therefore not criticize the neo-Nazis about anything.
AlternativeRight.com is run by actual literal neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
They're calling themselves Nazis, and it's technically accurate. There's no need for their opponents to do it, and also, why should we censor facts simply because they are politically incorrect? Does it hurt the alt-right's feelings to be called "Nazi"? Facts don't care about your feelings.
Let's see....
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6rsng3/unite_th...
> I want to be perfectly clear with you guys that many of the people who will be there are National Socialist and Ethnostate sort of groups. I don’t endorse them. In this case, the pursuit of preserving without shame white culture, our goals happen to align. I’ll be there regardless of the questionable company because saving history is more important than our differences. This is probably why they named the event “Unite the Right.”
> Speaking for myself only, I won't be punching right. We need to save civilization first, we can argue about the exact details later.
and from the comments:
> Exactly. Anything to the right of Elizabeth warren is already a nazi ready to gas six trillion Jews so might as well say fuck it. The enemies of my enemy are my friends
https://altright.com/2017/08/05/the-unite-the-right-rally-is...
> The Daily Stormer [a neo-Nazi site] has been promoting the event heavily and it looks like they are going to bring a lot of young new cadres to the rally. Identity Evropa [a white-nationalist group] will be there as well as several Southern Nationalist groups. There will be no Alt-Lite co-rally, it will be just us, the proverbial and literal White Guard out there defending the statue of General Lee. This is a good development. They are quickly becoming irrelevant and losing their street presence as we continue to grow and take up space.
https://www.dailystormer.com/a-normies-guide-to-the-alt-righ...
Describing the origin of the alt-right:
> On 4chan, the Jewish problem was analyzed by news junkies and history buffs, feminism was deconstructred by sexually frustrated young men, and race was considered based on the actual data on the issue. The rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP largely took place on 4chan.
> This newly formulated Nazi ideology was then combined with the established troll culture, based on memes, hilarious images designed to transmit cultural concepts, and “lulz,” a term coined by the troll Jameth which defines the type of malicious humor associated with trolling.
The only way you can claim that they're not marching with neo-Nazis and promoting neo-Nazism is if you use a definition of alt-right that's different from how the alt-right define themselves. As far as I can tell, the term "alt-lite" was created specifically to disavow the small number of people who refused to stand with the neo-Nazis.
The problem is people like yourself and other outlets lumped them altogether as one when they are more diverse than that. They then just ran with it.
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-co...
The broad strokes are more common coming from the liberals and love to assume everyone is a nazi because its easier to debate.
You're again using exactly the tactic I described: bringing up white supremacists to derail any discussion and discredit any person the left doesn't approve of.
Whoever marches in Charlottesville represents those who march in Charlottesville. They don't speak for the rest of the "alt-right", whatever that is.
Can we assume that if some duly constituted group --- whatever definition we choose --- sponsors a march in solidarity with neo-Nazis, and the group is not riven with dissent over that action, that it's germane to compare members of that group (or, at least, those who knowingly remain after the march) with Nazis? Again: the action isn't dispositive; it just means the comparison, right or wrong, isn't frivolous.
Are we talking about anyone who's done so here?
If not, why bring them up?
As far as I know, that's not some duly constituted group - it's an insult used against a wide variety of people ("everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders") by their political adversaries.
And the intention of the insult is to encourage exactly what happened here - to associate people like James Damore with people like those marching in Charlottesville.
One of the very first things I wrote here said not only that I don't have evidence that Damore is part of "the alt right" ---- one of his enthusiastic supporters did --- but to reject the logic that would assign him to any such group. Conservatives are not neo-Nazis. I'm not a conservative, but I have plenty of conservative friends, and I actually enjoy talking to them about policy more than to my fellow liberals.
So, again, I'm just interested in the principles here. Could you check out those two questions I asked upthread and give me a quick take on them? Thanks!
I think that's a weird outcome but I believe that's where we're at.
Here's what happened on this thread (all paraphrased):
1. "This firing was so dumb that it's going to drive lots of people into the arms of the alt-right".
2. "That's useful for the left because it allows them to call people Nazis without invoking Godwin's law".
3. "That's not what Godwin's law says, and regardless, the Nazi/alt-right comparison isn't frivolous.
And here we are.
My stake in this discussion isn't about Damore, who, for the third time, I don't believe is an alt-right figure (much as the alt-right would love to claim him as one). Rather, it's in challenging the trope that some accusations --- racism, Naziism, maybe communism? --- are so outré that they can't be made. That creates a safe space for people to actually be Nazis.
How is Charlottesville relevant again?
What I see here is me going out of my way to accommodate your concerns about this discussion, and you trying to use those concessions as ammunition. I understand why that happens (it's a message board), but I'm not trying to score points off you.
This page is about James Damore, so why are we spending so much time talking about white supremacists and Nazis?
Unless you can directly justify the connection, I'm going to continue pointing out that making such irrelevant and unjustified associations is a common smear tactic.
The SBC is to the right of Bernie Sanders. For example, it prohibits male pastors and says the husband is the head of the family and the wife subservient to him.
They define 'alt-right' as a synonym for white supremacy, thusly: Racism and white supremacy are, sadly, not extinct but present all over the world in various white supremacist movements, sometimes known as "white nationalism" or "alt-right" - http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/2283/on-the-antigospel-of-alt...
Therefore, your description about this being a tactic of the left doesn't hold water.
> They define 'alt-right' as a synonym for white supremacy
That's not how the term is usually used online, though, except to suggest that anyone to right of Bernie Sanders is a white supremacist.
The world alt-right was a) coined by its members, not by its detractors and b) stands for "alternative right," that is, it implies that there exists a mainstream right wing that is not the alt-right.
(It's also a term used in the real world and not just "online debate"; for instance, the alt-right is marching in Charlottesville this weekend, which is located in Virginia and not on the internet.)
(He doesn't actually seem to self-identify as "alt-right," so I think there is room for disagreement here.)
https://twitter.com/search?q=alt-right
For example, here's the tech editor at Business Insider UK clarifying 'alt-right':
> Lot of alt-right people in my mentions say Jordan Peterson isn't alt-right. Happy to clarify!
> Peterson has criticised gender-neutral pronouns, feminism, and definitions of cultural appropriation. So, lots of overlap there.
Perhaps they do. But its also done by those on the right, so you are over-specializing when you limit it to "the left".
Oh no, people on the left drink water as a tactic to decrease thirst! We must stop drinking water so we aren't like the left!
When the left uses false associations with Nazis to try to discredit anyone who challenges their agenda, I object.
Your argument style is tedious. You seem to deliberately avoid understanding what others say, and instead change the topic to the conversation you want to defend.
I'm not sorry if you find pointing out this obvious, common smear tactic tedious. I find the people using the tactic tedious.
"The Associated Press warned this week that the media outlets should avoid using the term “alt-right” because “it is meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims.”" ...
"And now, a new working paper from researchers at the University of Arkansas and Northwestern University sharply underscores the extent to which people who identify as “alt-right” harbor prejudicial views toward non-white people."
So, not just the Southern Baptists.
Anyway, even if you think all the same things Damore did, why on earth would you grow a second ego, and circulate a memo of these ramblings to your company? Who in their right mind would do something like this? Who thinks that I MUST tell everyone at work my thoughts that I know to be highly controversial in the form of a memo? Who does this and expects to keep a job?
That is not how law works
That is literally the opposite of what the email says, unless you think that a) the company is intentionally lying and b) fewer than XX.X percentage of women are qualified for the job. (Since you haven't stated what XX.X is, I am somewhat worried that you think that this is true for all XX.X > 0.)
Also, this idea that there is a total order of humans on "qualified for the job" seems a little naive, as does the idea that your interview process can reliably identify the total order. In every interview process I've been involved with, we're perfectly happy to take anyone who's qualified for the job (and we barely trust our interview process to yield that one bit of information reliably) and interested in the job. If there are multiple candidates, we're usually happy to try to take all of them. If we can't, we're much more interested in finding who's the better fit for the team, including axes like skill gaps on the team and cultural fit, than ranking the successful candidates on who's "better qualified".
If they intend to increase the percentage of women, they intend to hire women. Hiring "the best people for the job" might increase the percentage of women, or decrease it, and would not be a reliable strategy to achieve the stated goal.
Why? Maybe you know, or at least strongly believe, that your previous hiring has been biased against women, in which case starting to hire the best people for the job would be (to your belief) a reliable strategy.
Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man, a 64% chance the best two are both men, a 51% chance the best three are all men, and so on.
Hiring the best candidates isn't a reliable strategy for increasing the percentage of women unless the current percentage of women is near 0 and you plan on hiring a lot of people.
If the current percentage of women is over 20%, hiring the best candidates is actually more likely to decrease the percentage of women.
> Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man,
Hold up, I think you skipped a step there. I claim that 80% of engineers are men because of sexist employment practices, not because 80% of people qualified to be an engineer are men and employment practices are entirely unbiased.
Only if requiring a relevant degree is a sexist employment practice.
The 80/20 ratio begins in college, or earlier. Again, not something an individual employer can correct for in the short term.
One, there's a difference between necessary and sufficient. You can get a degree with a 4.0; you can get a degree with a 2.0. It seems entirely plausible to believe that (especially if, as argued by James Damore, men are attracted to tech because it's a high-status field) the number of men who are good at their job is a small subset of those who have a CS degree.
Two, if we believe that the 80/20 ratio begins in college and is reflective of biases and not actual ability, then it's at least reasonable to argue that requiring a degree is a sexist practice. (It might not be, too, but I think it's not 100% clear that it isn't.)
Here's a report from HBR on why women interested in studying engineering in college leave: https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...
If there is a social effect from a sexist culture that discourages women who are struggling with their engineering classes from staying with their original choice of degree, but doesn't equally discourage men who are struggling with their engineering classes, we'd definitely expect to see the phenomenon I suggested above where more men receive engineering degrees than women, but that's not reflective of men being better at the work on average.
(Also, the HBR report points out that internships and job prospects have the effect of pushing apparent sexism back down the pipeline into college. People are smart enough to tell that they're better off picking a different field if they'll be unhappy in their current one. So causality can certainly be such that sexist practices in industry hiring create visible gender imbalance in college degrees.)
Three, plenty of tech companies have quite loudly proclaimed that a CS degree is not something you need to get into tech. Peter Thiel literally runs a fellowship encouraging people to drop out of college. Lots of famous founders are college dropouts. It makes little financial sense to go back and get a CS degree if you didn't make the decision to get one at 18; requiring one doesn't seem like a high-quality hiring practice, even leaving demographics and discrimination (in whatever direction) entirely out of the question. You'll have tons of false negatives.
Whatever the reason women drop out of, or don't enter, the field, an employer looking for people to hire will find that 80% of the candidates are men.
I am claiming that if 80% of the candidates are men and 20% are women, that's quite likely to be because that pool has far more unqualified men than unqualified women. Maybe it's 5% qualified men and 5% qualified women. Maybe it's 20% qualified men and 10% qualified women, which is still only 33% women, but very different from the original pool.
There is zero reason to believe that a process that specifically looks for the most qualified applicants is going to look the same as a process that chooses blindly and randomly from the applicants!
The only reason you'd expect that outcome to be guaranteed is if your hiring process is literally broken and has been picking people at random -- which is a good reason to move to one that actually tries to hire the most qualified people -- which is literally what the employer said it was doing.
That may be true but it's not a neutral assumption. You'll have to provide evidence.
I don't know what you mean by "sexist argument," but yes, I am making an argument that because of pervasive industry-wide sexism, ability is not independent of gender in applicants to tech jobs.
I agree that I need to provide evidence for this (and I'm sort of intending to write up something arguing this, but I'm at a conference this week). But I Googled for 'average gpa men women computer science', and the first paper I found shows that retention rates in college are worse for women than men year-over-year, but GPAs are worse for men than women year-over-year, which matches the hypothesis I came up with earlier.
https://engineering.purdue.edu/MIDFIELD/Papers/2005-graduati...
The second reason is that I want to know more about what's happening. As mentioned up-thread, I'm not a huge fan of university degree credentialism. I myself gave up finishing my master's after determining that there was nothing that it would gain me; it would not open any opportunities in life that I cared about. Given the fact that the tech industry seems to celebrate people (usually men) dropping out of college and becoming rockstars in a startup, is it possible that men are leaving college because they determine that spending more tuition money won't help them, but fewer women are confident of that? If so, then that's definitely an inequality, but the direction of the inequality and the ways to solve it are quite different from a naive reading of the facts.
This hypothesis would also explain the GPA difference: if we believe that some fraction of men doing well in college drop out, but women doing equally well tend to finish their degree, that would explain why the average GPA tends to be lower among men as time goes on.
Again, to be clear, I have no information about this; as mentioned I didn't know this until you brought it up. I'm hypothesizing, that's all. Certainly another hypothesis is "men are being pushed out of college for some reason." We'd need more data, for instance, information on what those men who drop out end up doing.
The third reason is that my selfish motivation is raising the quality of my potential coworkers, and my energy to care about all possible injustices in the world is limited. If there's a phenomenon of, say, men dropping out of college and joining a tech firm and becoming a mediocre coworker, then I will care somewhat immediately. If there are men dropping out who would be stellar performers and excellent teammates had they only finished their degree, I will also care. If there are men dropping out and going to some other industry because they're not good enough for tech, well, I'm sad about that and I wish we could retain and train them (I do genuinely believe that training + willingness to learn is way more important than innate ability), but it's not the highest-priority problem.
But this is all off-topic; do you agree that I've provided some data to argue that my hypothesis (that an 80/20 applicant pool is likely not to have an 80/20 split in qualified applicants) is at least within the realm of possibility?
The company can try to attract more women to interviews thus changing the 80%. Then you will hire more women, still selecting best people for the job. And it's not "hiring women intentionally" on my book.
That would certainly be recruiting women intentionally.
I object most of all to the dishonesty of the company's statement when they try to suggest that they can increase the percentage of women without discriminating.
You may say that "making your company more desirable for women" is discrimination as it makes a distinction in favor of women based on gender. Technically that would be correct. But this will not be discrimination in hiring. I.e. from the given candidate pool women will not be chosen over men because they are women.
This will not be hiring women intentionally. So the original statement in discussion may be correct.
(And to answer a potential objection: I am also in favor of mechanisms that encourage potentially-qualified non-women who would not have applied for the job to apply.)
I'm not. Gender-biased recruiting is orthogonal to "getting more people to apply".
You can change the gender balance of applicants without increasing the number, and vice-versa.
Many, many jobs are filled simply by virtue of the candidate's professional contacts, half-baked interview processes, and gut-instinct. Given this, it won't hurt to make an effort to hire more women and minorities in roles where they've been underrepresented.
Under your interpretation, they're still lying.
You can't _really_ tell, in advance, if one candidate or another is better suited. Sure, a "D" student who failed at the white-board is probably not a good choice compared to an "A" student who aced the whiteboard... usually.
But what we're talking about here, at worst, is relatively minor differences in a female vs male candidate, where the underrepresented gender gets a "boost." In other hiring scenarios, the candidate's professional contacts or school pedigree or family connections may give a similar (or even greater) boost.
How did you conclude that? May be they are just making the work environment more suitable for women? May be more women are applying to your workplace? How did you conclude that the women engineers coming in are less qualified than men?
This shows he has no problem with affirmative action - aka discrimination - as long as he profits. But as soon as someone else profits, he disagrees.
________________________
[2] because "Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently"
EDIT: He argues that political diversity is most important:
> Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
and that Google should change its hiring practices to improve this, instead of ethnical or national diversity.
And he makes up more pseudo-scientific arguments for why Google should hire more conservatives:
> conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.
In the context of his memo - where he states that Google is too far left-wing - the recommended changes are obvious: Hire more conservative. He also recommends to track the political affiliation of all existing employees to track the diversity gap there:
> I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation
This is the same kind of affirmative action that he criticizes just a few paragraphs before.
EDIT2: With regards to biologically inferior, he references IQ (see his footnote 8, and its use in text), "Neuroticism", and other pseudo-scientific arguments why women would be biologically inferior.
Please state the specific passages where he:
- argues for affirmative action specifically benefiting conservatives
- calls women genetically inferior
If he wanted to get his side of the story out after being fir4ed, he could have taken advantage of any of many news organizations - which range across the political spectrum - that were offering a platform to speak from. Instead, he stopped responding to those requests and gave an interview with an "alt-right", "men's rights" activist host, Stefan Molyneux. This is one of the worst things he could have done if he wanted to avoid being associated with misogyny.
I get the impression that a lot of people are not familiar with how fascist ("alt-right") propaganda works. While Molyneux's audience is large, interviewing with the NYT or Breitbart would have reached a larger audience, so this isn't about getting his story out. This isn't about the contents of the memo and the bad science about sex-linked preferences. It's about repeating the idea as many times as possible until the idea of discriminating against women becomes normalizes as a legitimate political question.
The lawsuit itself is similar: it keeps people talking about discrimination. The propaganda works regardless of the outcome of the case. If you want to see a very good explanation of how this type of propaganda works, see this[2] explanation of how "Triumph of the Will" probably influenced your mental model of the Nazi party.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...
> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
The Guardian misrepresented the memo, why would Damore trust them to publish the interview honestly?
An argument about how the Guardian's supposed misrepresentation of the memo is would conveniently distraction away from my main point: he ran straight to an alt-right misogynist for his first interview instead of taking any of the other options.
You even suggested that he really avoided mainstream sources fearing misrepresentation, which means Molyneux must was his safe space.
If the best evidence you can find for your proposition is that he once spoke with someone, you should drop the idea.
> he really avoided mainstream sources fearing misrepresentation
Not "fearing". Having actually experienced misrepresentation.
Also, not "mainstream", far-left, like The Guardian.
Salma Hayek is right: compared with women, men are lazy and entitled
Edit: FWIW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian says it's "centre-left". By comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit... describes Morning Star as "Left-wing, socialist".
She seems to write a lot of op-ed type pieces, which are meant to "oppose" the editorial page (in a physical sense, but sometimes in voice/topic). The fact that the freelance editor is OK with working with her, over and over, is not nothing. Just as Bret Stephens being hired as a NYT columnist is not nothing about the NYT's priorities, even as he has no contact or relationship with NYT's news reporters.
Clearly she likes The Guardian and they like her opinion very much.
More significantly, their opinion writers range from left to extreme left.
Again, what is your point? Do you think opinion pieces must be in lock-step with the newspaper as a whole?
All you've shown is that The Guardian publishes pieces from people with views that typically lie on the left (though are not reflective of everyone on the left). Which is, you know, the "left" in "center left".
Every article they publish about someone from the right is an attack.
How is that centrist?
Quoting again from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian:
"Then Guardian features editor Ian Katz asserted in 2004 that "it is no secret we are a centre-left newspaper".[120] In 2008, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley said that editorial contributors were a mix of "right-of-centre libertarians, greens, Blairites, Brownites, Labourite but less enthusiastic Brownites, etc," and that the newspaper was "clearly left of centre and vaguely progressive". She also said that "you can be absolutely certain that come the next general election, The Guardian's stance will not be dictated by the editor, still less any foreign proprietor (it helps that there isn't one) but will be the result of vigorous debate within the paper".[121] The paper's comment and opinion pages, though often written by centre-left contributors such as Polly Toynbee, have allowed some space for right-of-centre voices such as Sir Max Hastings and Michael Gove. "
One of the opinion pieces by Gove is https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/29/hero-c... titled "My hero: Lord Harris, the Conservative millionaire who is saving schools". If it is an attack then it is an attack on the Labour Party.
"Julie Bindel is about as far-left as possible".
Are you really that oblivious as to what the real far-left looks like?
Typically it applies to someone to the left of social democracy, like a Communist, Trotskyist, democratic socialist, or Maoist.
While https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Bindel describes her as: While focusing on male violence against women, Bindel also writes about gender inequality in general, as well as stalking, religious fundamentalism, lesbian rights, opposition to the sex industry and human trafficking.[8] She refers to herself as a political lesbian feminist.
This is mainstream feminist left, not far-left.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is further to the left. Here are some of his policies, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon#Politi...: He is a proponent of increased labour rights and the expansion of French welfare programmes.[33] Mélenchon has also called for the mass redistribution of wealth to rectify existing socioeconomic inequalities.[33] Domestic policies proposed by Mélenchon include a 100 per cent income tax on all French citizens earning more than 360,000 Euros a year, full state reimbursement for health care costs, a reduction in presidential powers in favour of the legislature, and the easing of immigration laws.[34] Mélenchon supports women's right to abortion and same-sex marriage. He also supports the legalisation of cannabis.[35]
He founded La France Insoumise, a democratic socialist political party. He started as a member of the Internationalist Communist Organisation.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/31/gender.weekend...
who's opposed to jury trials in rape cases
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/12/juries...
and marriage
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/may/25/...
That may not be the same far left as communism, but that is far left, not mainstream.
Michael Gove only wrote 13 articles for The Guardian over 10 years.
And I don't know why you thought pointing out that another Guardian opinion writer was a communist would help your case.
The example from Gove was to point out that your statement that The Guardian "publishes the opinion of people on the left and on the far left" but not from the right is incorrect.
Are you going to update all of the Wikipedia pages from "centre-right" to "far right"? Because it looks like to me that you have no idea of what "far left" really means. Perhaps you think that that anything to the left of the US Democratic Party is "far left"?
Also, most of what you mentioned aren't on the left/right spectrum. There are many leftists who hold completely opposing views.
Nobody can clearly define what those terms mean anyway. Perhaps we can agree The Guardian is centre-left by UK standards and far-left by American standards.
Answer: the US one, where there's been 80 years of anti-communist, anti-socialist propaganda to turn "liberal" and "progressive" into slurs and to keep people from knowing what "the left" really means.
The UK standard in this regard is shared with most of the rest of Europe and the European ex-colonies (South America, Australia, South Africa, etc.) It's the US which is the odd-one-out.
Hardly. The US is to the left social democratically and culturally of nearly every country outside Western Europe.
What's the innocuous explanation for first speaking out on Stefan Molyneux's channel? That Damore has only heard of Molyneux, but Molyneux happened to be the first to successfully reach out to Damore?
Or if we assume Damore was the initiator in getting his story out, why would Molyneux be the first contact, as opposed to someone like Cernovich, who has a much bigger audience and has been blogging/tweeting in extensive support of Damore? I suppose Damore believes there's a substantive difference in politics/style/production between Molyneux/Cernvoich/Peterson/etc. But that he knows enough about Molyneux to want to give him priority probably means Damore is not just a causal fan.
I get that Damore doesn't trust nor feel obligated to talk to the left-wing-side of media, e.g. CNN/MSNBC/NYT. But literally anyone at FOX News would be just as sympathetic as Molyneux towards Damore, while having a bigger audience and more mainstream credibility (plus, production values that doesn't make Damore look and sound like a basement Twitch streamer).
(I don't watch Molyneux enough to have a strong opinion about his associations. But given his decent-but-not-huge channel, seems unusual that he'd be Damore's first pick by chance, given Damore's many options).
What's wrong with that explanation?
Perhaps Damore, like most of us, doesn't watch any of Molyneux/Cernvoich/Peterson and thus simply accepted an interview from whoever contacted him first.
In case you haven't noticed, that choir has been growing remarkably quickly.
I'm a liberal and liberals could use a healthy dose of reality
The only one I'm familiar with is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4WoeOkj2Ng ... which kind of left me with the opposite impression. Can you link to the ones you're talking about? I would love to feel better about his being fired.