Smearing Free Thought in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Smearing Free Thought in Silicon Valley

quillette.com

55 pointscosmiccartel39 comments

This article is a great example about why there is a sexual harassment problem in technology. It's conflating two completely different things in the name of "free thinking": the facts about men and women and the severity of sexism. Are men and women different? Yes. Have those differences ever been shown to affect their ability to do the same job? No. Sexism exists because of the perceived answer to the second question, not the first.

The dismissal of Costolo's point about the urgency of addressing sexual harassment based on a false dichotomy summarizes the key flaw in the entire article. You cannot simultaneously have an intellectual debate about a topic when one of the parties involved is being actively demeaned and marginalized.

I'm confused by your last sentence. How else can we decide which side or sides is/are being demeaned/marginalized other than intellectual debate?

The terms are often used specifically to end debate, by negating the opinions of the accused without having to address the content of what was said.

None of these issues will be solved until those who feel they are being demeaned find the strength to address their opposition with the dignity they demand for themselves.

No, I wasn't trying to end debate. Your position is, in contrast, an appeal to motive which is a logical fallacy.

We cannot expect the people who have been discriminated against and oppressed to stand up on their own. That is not the approach of a civil society, that is placing the entire burden on the wronged party.

We can expect people who are discriminated against and oppressed - I don't doubt this as the case - to explain why and how they were discriminated against so that it can be addressed. We can expect there to be some semblance of discourse. We can only ask that the accusations remain truthful and not go beyond what actually occurred.

Nobody changes their opinion by being badgered. One must have empathy if one expects genuine change. We have objectively failed in this as a society, as is exhibited by how divided we are.

I'm personally tired of hearing how everything is the other side's fault, from both sides. We are drowning in straw men. Until we're willing to listen to each other and understand why people feel the way they do (yes, even those with the most vile opinions), we will continue down this path.

> How else can we decide which side or sides is/are being demeaned/marginalized other than intellectual debate?

The problem is that "intellectual debate" often ends up just being thinly-veiled excuses for why it's ok to discriminate against the marginalized group. It's kind of like how "intellectual debate" about phrenology was used to justify attitudes about different races.

I notice you didn't answer my question.

> You cannot simultaneously have an intellectual debate about a topic when one of the parties involved is being actively demeaned and marginalized.

So as long as a single man is sexist, there’s no place for intellectual debate?

No, that's an over simplification. Until the statistically high rate of sexual harassment and discrimination is addressed we cannot have a valid intellectual debate on whether sex influences someone's ability as a software engineer.

Why not?

I'll be willing to bet no one can answer this

I just did, above. Let me know if you disagree.

Because the harassment itself becomes a limiting factor on women's ability to perform the role. You cannot have objective measurements of performance with the bias introduced by harassment.

> Have those differences ever been shown to affect their ability to do the same job? No.

Has anyone claimed that? No.

Why arguing against something for which no one is arguing for? If sexism exist because of a perceived answer to which no one is asking, then maybe it is time to stop.

That was the entire argument in the Damore essay. He made a logical jump from facts about men and women to the claim that women were less capable as software engineers.

If he made that claim, then you can quote it and cite it from his document.

This article is about how he did not make that claim, while media outlets and social media accounts claimed he did.

"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business."

I don't see, "less capable as engineers" stated or implied in that quote.

> Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Women are less suited for high stress jobs, i.e. leadership positions.

It's also possible that women are, overall, less interested in high stress jobs.

It is very clear you think he argue for it, but does that matter? Ask people here, is there anyone who is arguing that gender affect a person ability to do the same job? Is anyone who has voiced concern about the aftermath the Google memo affair explicit said that they think so?

Do gender affect a person ability to do the same job? No. Until you find someone who says "yes" to that question, should we not all rejoice over the fact that we all agree 100% on the answer is this question, and only disagree on the interpretation of the intentions behind an internal memo?

I think there may be a third question: Do differences between men and women, in combination with the effects of historicity, lead to different patterns of engagement or attrition with a domain? Such as teaching or child-related jobs?

> Have those differences ever been shown to affect their ability to do the same job? No

Just want to point out that this isn't necessarily true in a broader sense; look at all the recent coverage of women being allowed to serve in frontline combat roles in various Western militaries around the world - their drop out, and medical discharge rate has been exponentially higher than their male counterparts. So while some women can do that same job as men in that field, the vast majority physically cannot.

Why is this post flagged?

I think the policy of flagging without providing an explanation is becoming a problem on contentious issues. It allows a minority to have disproportionate influence on a discussion.

I think there are several conflicting ideas of flagging:

- Reason: I'm tired of this topic (I feel like this doesn't happen much, or else all this bitcoin talk would have stopped 3 years ago, as well as "Building X in language Y").

- Reason: I think this piece is non-factual and doesn't present any falsifiable claims.

- Reason: I think this piece is demonstrably inaccurate

- Reason: I think this is a controversial topic

I think controversy is an indication of the importance of a topic.

> In the aftermath of the so-called Google memo affair, there has been no shortage of misleading and in some cases downright inaccurate media coverage painting the author, James Damore, and his supporters in a very unfavorable light.

Personally I think the biggest problem is that people who criticize him keep going "he's wrong" "you can't say that" "saying women are less interested is sexist". It just lets others further their manufactured outrage and act like victims of oppression.

Vs he said things that strongly implied his female coworkers were less competent and he was fired because of the damage this did to the work environment.

> it is difficult to see how one could read his memo in its entirety and walk away with the conclusion that it was written by someone who seeks to keep women out of technology

uh huh. I'm getting really tired of being told I just didn't read it or understand it. I read it. I think Damore is a fucking idiot for writing it that way. I also think the basic idea "maybe less women are interested" is perfectly reasonable to talk about. I think bringing up how much more neurotic women are was incredibly fucking stupid. I think bring up the fact that he's a conservative was just him whining. I think the people who say "it's science" are missing the point. I think his memo was incredibly slanted and discussed no reasons beyond some tenuous biological links as reasons for women not to go into tech.

I also think a lot of the people who keep complaining about how they want a dialogue are being disingenuous, because when someone says something against the memo the response is that they obviously didn't read it.

> a political movement seeking to raise awareness of how gender inequality issues affect men and boys that has long been smeared in the media as misogynistic.

maybe cause it's pretty misogynistic. check their Reddit sometime (although it's not as bad as MGTOW).

> it is not a hate movement rooted in misogyny

but there does seem to be a lot of misogyny in it.

They have real complaints about some things, but I feel like it's pretty easy to why people are turned off by it.

Every repugnant conclusion has always come coated in a veneer of rationality. No racist, sexist, islamophobe or any other kind of bigot has ever called themselves by these appellations or expressed their opinions without being able to bring in piles of dubious evidence to back up their opinions.

Let's take the example of the Men's Rights Movement discussed in the article. While there are of course many factions within the MRM, the very existence of something that arose specifically to counteract the rise of feminism is a slap in the face to the struggles brought forth by women. With the same veneer of rationality, its purpose is to drown out women's concerns by raising the voices of men to a raucous cry.

This is not to say that men do not experience problems, but the MRM is almost exclusively a reaction to feminism. It's an age-old divisionary tactic, of pitting an oppressed group against an even more oppressed group. The English American colonists considered the genocided Native Americans to be one of their biggest oppressors, the war-torn Germans took to blaming the Jews who have already been persecuted for centuries. It's easier to find a weaker target than to look for the deeper causes of oppression.

The problem with Damore is not that his stats are wrong, but their veneer of rationality. Disagreeing with his repugnant conclusions (such as, eliminating Google's diversity programmes), is not because we hate scientific discourse, but because his veneer of rationality is just that: a veneer. The causes and explanations are far more complicated than what he cites or could cite in the space of 11 pages, and in the meantime it's far better to err in the side of caution and offer an advantage to the underrepresented group.

Note the veneer of rationality in the above comment.

I must have missed it - could you elaborate a bit?

I think his point is that "veneer of rationality" almost serves solely as ad-hominem, because there is no way to establish which side is truly rational other than through debate itself.

Can you explain more about what you find repugnant about Mr. Damore's conclusions? Repugnant is pretty loaded (emotive) word.

Let's begin by why Damore felt the need to write this in the first place: he was taking a diversity workshop. He was so offended by having to attend a lecture on how to be nice to disadvantaged groups that he wrote that wall of text.

"These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined."

The discriminatory practices he's referring is to have a few women-only classes. From my understanding, there also exist classes for everyone. Requesting to remove women-only is repugnant because those classes and similar initiatives have increased women's participation without reducing the number of men nor the opportunities for men.

Wanting to get rid of those classes is just the holders of the status quo fighting to keep the status quo.

"Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts. "

This is beyond stupid, having more women in something positive isn't the same thing as having more women in something negative. There are nuances and differences and wanting to have more women murdered is nothing like wanting to have more women in tech.

"In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility"

This is just an example, but the whole memo is written in a conservatives vs progressives or right vs left. This is divisive and confrontational. Bringing in more people shouldn't be a matter of two warring tribes, of which we must all pick a side. I don't know about you but there are some things I like about how things are now (conservative?) and some things I want to change (liberal?)

We're all a mishmash of opinions, not football teams.

"Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts."

It's impossible to be emotionally unengaged. There isn't some kind of division between thought and emotion, and emotion isn't the antithesis of rationality. We're all frail creatures with biases, emotions, thoughts. We're not machines, and even the machines we build exhibit our own emotions and biases.

So, no we should not de-emphasise empathy like he says. We're humans and we should be empathetic towards each other.

"Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees."

We all have biases. I have them, and so does Damore but he calls them rationality. By trying to remove training about those biases, he's trying to safeguard his biases even further.

Then there's the further damage that his document did... it has created a hostile atmosphere. Damore was right to be fired because who would want to work with a guy who is very rational about why women aren't statistically suited by nature for certain roles within the company?

There’s a quote: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”. It’s misattributed to Aristotle, but it’s a worthwhile thought. You’ve written a lot, but said nothing to address any of Mr. Damore’s statements head on, with an argument as to why he’s incorrect, just that his ideas are bad and create negative emotions in you.

I don't agree with some of his memo, but if I was to sit down and write something against it, I'd try to consider what he'd said rationally, without language like "repugnant" and "beyond stupid". I agree that we're not robots, but if we don't put reason before emotion, we're also not adults.

As to your last question, I really won't have a problem working with him.

>very existence of something that arose specifically to counteract the rise of feminism is a slap in the face to the struggles brought forth by women

Alternatively it is a group of people who disagree with what feminism has created and who considers themselves unjustly harmed by that movement. You can choose to smear them, of course, but if you do they are unlikely to want to help you and you should not be surprised when somebody else gets their support by trumping their course.

Or you could engage with them, try to understand their point of view and maybe, just maybe, reach some sort of common understanding.

Part of Men's Rights Movement can be historically describe as the Equality feminism[1] division the feminism movement when the "equality-versus-difference debate" in American feminism concluded in the early 1980. Its not without reason that before this, Men's Rights Movement did not exist. Their activism would be squarely within the goals of the feminism movement.

Here in Sweden we saw a bunch of laws being removed that distinguished between gender in the period of 1960-1980. Alimony was removed, and laws was drafted to address social problems in a gender neutral way. Divorce law and family law was also changed. Practically all those changes stopped at the end of the 1970, with the only exception being gender equal conscription in 2017 (which the feminist movement has been mostly against and the MRA movement mostly in favor).

As with any movement there are extremes and splinter factions, but MRM is mostly a reaction to feminism leaving behind the theory of being undifferentiated.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_feminism

It's still hard for me to get over the fact that the very first people Damore had interview him were Stephen "cult leader" Molyneux and Jordan Petersen. He's also got interviews with Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. It's totally possible that they were the only outlets that would give him a platform, but those are very biased and partisan outlets. If he was as objective and free thinking as he's depicted as, why was his first reaction to jump to one of the extremes?

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux

I'd mainly chalk that up to them being the only ones open to a genuine discussion with him. The articles coming out in the aftermath were all extremely demonizing of Damore.

I remember watching Peterson's interview with him, and Damore didn't really seem comfortable with many of the former's statements, just based on his body language. Maybe that was just social awkwardness.

Also, I don't follow Molyneux or Carlson, but neither Peterson nor Shapiro can be truthfully called extreme.

Shapiro seems pretty extreme, just more mainstream conservatism.

Peterson just has a head the size of ontario at this point.

Here it's mentioned that no one on the left had wanted to interview him: http://seriouspod.com/sio79-james-damore-author-google-memo/

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