Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting how many tech guys consider this guy some kind of martyr.

People are upset about his odious "Google Memo" because it's not their first rodeo with a dude who weasels around and justifies his racism/sexism with pseudoscience, not because they were "misled" by "clickbait media" or whatever.

They weren't incorrect. The 32 supposedly-critical citation links point ovewhelmingly to garbage, including 5 wikipedia links, a dozen opinion pieces, some more "academic" essays, a link to MRA-founder Warren Farrell's blog, and, perhaps best of all, a link that simply points to a google search for the term "political correctness" (lol). The "graphs" are made in powerpoint with the curve tool (one of them the infamous bell curve), and the axes don't even have ticks on them.

It's evident to anyone familiar with "the scene" that the dude got all his info from anti-feminist YouTube/Reddit, and this was proven beyond a doubt when he went on to speak at anti-feminist YouTube channels immediately after getting fired. he wasn't widely misunderstood, people just saw right through his multiple disclaimers.

This Quora answer was pretty final for me: https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio...

Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.

Even if most people that make similar points are just "weaseling around" and justifying their racism/sexism, this is not reason enough to assume the worst. That's how you get thoughtcrime, were the faintest association with unorthodox thought self-evidently makes you a despicable person who should be punished and whose ideas should be ignored.

Many tech guys are waking up to the farcical, oppressive way in which some leftists spread their ideas and silence their opponents, and won't stand for it any longer.

> Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.

I strongly disagree with your "even if" hypothetical.

Dialectics are a process for arriving at truth, not the source of truth itself. I think this is something hard-core rationalists often seem to forget.

In terms of time, emotional energy, and so on, evaluating arguments is very expensive.

Ignoring an argument because its source is "odious"ly biased is the political equivalent of using heuristics to prune a huge search space. It may not always give you an optimal answer. But then, climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways.

And remember, in an argumentative setting, the search space is adversarially constructed. So you can actually be pretty damn certain that without heuristics, you'll never find the truth.

> this is not reason enough to assume the worst

The degree to which people are "assuming the worst" seems to be one of the major sources of disagreement.

FWIW I don't think many of Damore's detractors are "assuming the worst" from the outset. Complaints about the essay tend to identify specific claims, specific phrases, specific arguments that serve as heuristics for choosing not to continue evaluating the argument in good faith.

You can argue against those heuristics all you want, but I don't think that this argument is even possible to have without some heuristics. Case in point: Damore uses his own set of totally unsound heuristics (see e.g., the complaining about "political correctness", the graphs that are actually just pictorial representations of prior assumptions, and so on).

> Ignoring an argument because its source is "odious"ly biased is the political equivalent of using heuristics to prune a huge search space.

You're proving Damore's point. You refuse to consider his arguments because of your prejudiced, emotional reaction. This is patently irrational.

> It may not always give you an optimal answer. But then, climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways.

This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational.

> So you can actually be pretty damn certain that without heuristics, you'll never find the truth.

You'll never find the truth if you irrationally dismiss arguments that oppose your prejudiced opinions--unless, of course, you've already arrived at the truth. But believing you've already arrived at the truth would be arrogant and closed-minded, right?

> You refuse to consider his arguments because of your prejudiced, emotional reaction

GP gave a hypothetical, and I'm responding to that hypothetical.

In fact, I did not refuse to consider his arguments. I considered them. They're poorly sourced, terribly reasoned, and not very well communicated. FWIW I do feel bad that they guy lost his job for what amounts to poor communication, worse argumentation skills, and a misplaced belief that engineers are special enough to be exempt from the generally shitty employee/employer relationship as it exists in the USA.

But that's all beside the point, because I'm responding to a hypothetical.

> You'll never find the truth if you irrationally dismiss arguments

My point is that you'll ALSO never find truth if you climb every adversary-constructed hill in the state space. Your suggested method for finding truth is even worse than mine, and what's more, you're claiming the opposite.

I'm at least admitting that I have to use heuristics. You're just watching the tower of exponentials crank up and claiming "no problem! We can compute that!"

> But believing you've already arrived at the truth would be arrogant and closed-minded, right?

It's possible to remain open to new ideas and also not waste time on evaluating or responding to arguments that aren't motivated by a genuine search for truth. (Again, this comment was in response to a hypothetical.)

I highly doubt you actually disagree with me in practice, because such a life would surely doom you to misery and unemployment. Do you spend all your free time reading and/or responding to arguments from flat earthers, BS science posted on white supremacy forums, and marketing claims made by infomercials and bill boards? Do you engage with every crank preacher and evangelist who comes to your door or yells at you on the street? Of course not.

> In fact, I did not refuse to consider his arguments. I considered them. They're poorly sourced, terribly reasoned, and not very well communicated.

There are prominent, respected authorities and experts on both sides of the political spectrum who disagree with you, ones who have explained in detail why they disagree with you. What do you think about that?

> My point is that you'll ALSO never find truth if you climb every adversary-constructed hill in the state space.

I feel like you didn't read my comment, because you're repeating your previous argument: "...climbing every ant hill to the bitter end may not get you to an answer in your lifetime anyways," to which I responded, "This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational."

> Your suggested method for finding truth is even worse than mine, and what's more, you're claiming the opposite.

Again, I feel like you didn't read my comment. Where did I suggest such a method?

> I'm at least admitting that I have to use heuristics. You're just watching the tower of exponentials crank up and claiming "no problem! We can compute that!"

Where did I say that?

> It's possible to remain open to new ideas and also not waste time on evaluating or responding to arguments that aren't motivated by a genuine search for truth.

I agree with this.

However, you are jumping to a conclusion by assuming that he is not interested in the truth. It is quite arrogant of you, to assume you know what is in his mind and heart. This is not good faith on your part.

> Do you spend all your free time reading and/or responding to arguments from flat earthers, BS science posted on white supremacy forums, and marketing claims made by infomercials and bill boards? Do you engage with every crank preacher and evangelist who comes to your door or yells at you on the street? Of course not.

Once again you prove Damore's point: by equating him with such people, and equating his memo with such things, you are evincing an emotional, prejudiced overreaction and stubborn refusal to seriously consider his arguments.

> There are prominent, respected authorities and experts on both sides of the political spectrum who disagree with you

Disagree with my about what? I think it would be helpful if you put in words the claim you think I'm making. I feel that we're talking past one another because you think I'm talking about Damore when in fact I'm responding to a hypothetical posited by another commenter.

> This is a strawman and an argument to absurdity, i.e. also irrational.

I don't pay attention to Nazi's scientific arguments for racism, anti-feminist's claims that women are incapable of certain tasks, or infomercials' claims about how amazing a product is. In each situation the signal-to-noise ratio is intractable and the arguments are not made from the position of a genuine search for truth. I'm better off encountering that evidence in other contexts presented by genuine actors, or simply never seeing it at all. Not all arguments are helpful. Some are intentionally crafted to distract and obscure.

If you think that makes me irrational, so be it. Your disagreement strikes me as hopelessly naive. I'd rather behave irrationally than waste my life chasing down the errors in arguments made by biased idiots who have no problem with lying to advance their ideology.

> Again, I feel like you didn't read my comment. Where did I suggest such a method?

Well if you have no better method then I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. Give up on truth?

> However, you are jumping to a conclusion by assuming that he is not interested in the truth

Please read the entire thread. I am assuming this because it is posited as a hypothetical!

I fact, I do not believe this is true in Damore's case. But it is certainly true in the case of many people who are defending Damore (eg Mike Cernovich), and I don't think taking their arguments on face value is worth the time or effort. They are not interested in truth, they are interested in power, so their arguments are pointless if what you're interested in is truth.

But again, nowhere in this thread have I stated anything about Damore. I was responding to a hypothetical.

> by equating him with such people

Again, I was responding to a hypothetical!!!

I was responding to a hypothetical!!!

> should be debated and refuted

If you have even a passing acquaintance with the subject, this has been "debated and refuted" for hundreds of years.

Should "did NASA land on the Moon?" also be debated and refuted? Why or why not? If major TV networks ran hour-long specials, where each side gets to present their case for/against moon landings for 30 minutes, would this be beneficial to the world?

Are you saying that the question, "Did NASA land on the moon?" is equivalent to the question, "Is the main reason, that fewer women work at Google, that men are sexist?"

> Even if all you say is true and the guy is an odious anti-feminist, the points he made should be debated and refuted, not silenced.

Why? Why should everyone debate ideas which are made up by biased sources[1]? Should we also discuss why people from country X are more intelligent than people of race Y who immigrated from continent Z? Sorry, but not all ideas are gold.

> Many tech guys are waking up to the farcical, oppressive way in which some leftists spread their ideas and silence their opponents, and won't stand for it any longer.

At least it is fine till "leftists" are spreading ideas for peace, tolerance, and harmony, right? They are not calling for people of race/religion/country/sex X to leave country Y, right?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/13/james-dam...

Are you saying that there exist unbiased sources?

Who has the authority to determine which ideas are worth discussing? Are the rest of us obligated to comply with their judgments?

It was actual science if you bothered to read. But keep seeing the world through your heavily tinted ideological lense.

Did you read the Quora link? It provided scientific sources for all its claims in refuting the google employee document. If the Quora article is nonsense, then please refute the Quora article instead of throwing around "if you bothered to read" phrases.

No i didn't. But it doesn't even matter because your argument is invalid. Two articles/texts can be based in science and oppose each other. You know why? Because scientific literature can also disagree with each other.

But again your ideoligical lense doesn't allow you to even consider this possibility and instead automatically classifies anything that opposes your beliefs and what you have read as pseudo science.

Here's a comment that refutes the use of those "scientific" sources in the Quora post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021735

The final answer so far for me is from heterodox academy (Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt). They reference all relevant meta analysis papers directly.

https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/08/10/the-google-memo-what...

Not really surprising from a guy who, up until notoriety focussed attention on him and exposed it, was apparently claiming a Ph.D. he never earned on his LinkedIn resume.

One thing I would push back on is that science is never really final. It seems pretty clear that Damore misrepresented a lot of the research, though.

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