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> I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.

That may be what you personally felt in this single personal anecdote, but it is not at all supported by the results for the bay area in the election[1].

There were an enormous number of Trump voters who explicitly stated that they voted for him because he was the only national candidate to criticize things like NAFTA and other policies which directly hurt them and/or people they knew. Presented with a series of bad options, they picked the guy who spoke to their concerns and naively wrote off the outlandish comments as news-cycle spam. Go back and look at the contested areas in Michigan and Pennsylvania where Trump did well. Or go back and listen to the town hall Bernie Sanders did after the election in West Virginia where Trump performed well-- you can listen directly to what swayed them the most. It wasn't a fear of retribution from progressive tech bosses for non-progressive ideas. It was jobs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/california-preside...

OP is talking about the fact that people did not want to talk about their voting choice, for fear of criticism and being ostracized.

My mom - and almost all of her friends - are also in that group. What was so surprising about her group of friends was that NONE of them talked about who they were going to vote for, prior to the election - EVEN TO EACH OTHER. AFTER the election they were all shocked to find they all felt the same way and almost all had voted for Trump.

Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view.

Progressive culture in the US has become toxic. The sooner people realize this, the better.

> Their silence was directly a consequence of the doxx culture that would have meant their entire lives would be thrown into ruin for sharing their point of view.

You are making that claim where the evidence is people speculating about a case where they decided not to test the veracity of your claim.

Is there any evidence that your Mom and her friends would have been fired for expressing their political views?

I'm asking because here in the South people who voted for Trump a) express their views when I talk to them, and b) then go on about their day. Frustration, contention, and disagreements, and confusion abide but that's largely a function of Trump's high-noise rhetorical strategy and people (esp. older/retired) getting all their news from a single source. (Btw-- what happened to the stereotype of the proud/responsible U.S. working man reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table? Is that just a myth of a bygone era?)

It's not worth the risk. What evidence would you like them to present? When progressive people take it upon themselves to call up the employers of people who they disagree with until those people are let go, the evidence is there, in plain sight.

My mom and her friends do not live in the South. That really should have been your first clue.

About reading multiple newspapers at the breakfast table... well, we've spent the last 50 years destroying the family life, time, and perception of our media and journalism that would lead to that behavior, not to mention social media. Why would it survive?

As an outsider to American politics. This is 100% my vision also.

I know a lot of people that have moderate views that are simply shut down by liberals. As a response, they hide and vote for Trump.

I see it as their way to elect someone that is not afraid to go against the accepted view of the elites and therefore going against all that political correctness nonsense.

What "political correctness nonsense"?

Firing people for providing criticism of a company's diversity police, while citing science, and letting your friends in media drag the plaintiff through the mud.

Cancelling events and boycotting sponsors because their speaker line up isn't sufficiently in line with imaginary industry demographics. Or even because a blind selection process, the thing people say they want, ends up selecting a wrongthinker.

Bullying comet-chasing scientists into tearful apologies over their choice of shirt. Or a self deprecating joke. That's just in STEM, you see the same in comedy, in politics, etc.

In each instance, a pitchfork wielding mob was summoned with social media outrage by bad faith actors. And get this, they are the ones who also loudly complain about trolls.

The rule to make sense of it is quite easy: when they do it to you, it's just consequences for speech. When it happens to them, it's targeted harassment that makes people feel unsafe and someone needs to step in and ban it.

'Citing science'. I can think of a few other groups throughout history who have said awful things and backed it up with 'science'.

Yeah! Like Stanford Medical School in 2017. http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...

Thanks for the link

Sure, you can use science for evil things, like you could use a hammer to hit somebody on the head and a car to run somebody over. The problem here is not hammers and cars. If Damore were challenged on scientific grounds and refuted as such, it'd be fine (tbh, many people did exactly that and stopped there, and they were doing it right). But he was chased out as a heretic, not as someone who wrote scientific paper that was less than solid. He was chased out because him questioning this particular dogma is incompatible with being employed at this place, and because the culture we have now does not allow Google to be perceived as tolerating heretics.

One of the examples is trying to find offense in anything - literally from milk and pumpkin spice lattes to national anthem and math and logic as a basis of science. It's ok to think whether our actions could hurt anybody and adjust accordingly, but when it turns into obsessive offense mining and paranoid banning of anything that could that could be construed as offensive to anybody (usually only by the same people who do the banning, not even by the people that they purport to protect) - for some people it is just too much. It's a difference between reasonable hygiene and OCD when a person washes the hands for 4 hours. The first is great, the second is a debilitating disease. Many people feel the American culture has crossed the boundary into the disease and keeps marching on.

> because he feared that his 'out of place' political views would, in his words, 'indirectly limit his career options.' Why he supported Trump is pretty irrelevant, but I found his opinion reasonable, though I disagreed with his overall choice.

I think in SV, it is a completely reasonable precaution. If you openly declare you are, say, a communist (I don't mean "support Obamacare", I mean real communist, as in nationalize everything, ban private property, etc.), chances that people would shun you and that hurts you carrier are pretty small. If you say you voted for Trump, chances are higher, and I've heard people say as much pretty much open text.

> I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.

I'm not sure this observation has much value. Voting for a candidate that shares your values in a time when those values aren't popular is equivalent to doing so when those values are popular. Either way you're voting for a candidate that shares your values. I'm never going to place a spite-vote for someone who doesn't support my views just because my views are unpopular.

And in any case, I think certain views should be demonized. Expressing disparaging things about gay people (the example from the article) should be viewed with the same revulsion as we would today view the historical opinion that people of color were in some way "better suited" for slavery. The view that some people are somehow "less than" shouldn't be tolerated. The paradox of tolerance is very real.

> The paradox of tolerance is very real.

True but we aren't talking about things at that extreme. We were talking about an unwillingness to talk about your policital candidate, for fear of how "liberals" would treat you.

That should be alot more worrying to people than I think it is.

Leaning in from outside the US, the path forward is obvious.

"Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion.

That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power.

Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing, and that climate change will kill us all if we don't act.

Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats, because their party preference is rooted in tribalism rather than in policy, and you'd scare off lots of lefties who don't think the state should be outlawing important medical procedures.

> Unfortunately, most of the deplorables would just find new reasons to hate Democrats

That is objectively false - Trump won because white voters in the rust belt swung 25 points from Obama to Trump. If you were right that they voted only Republican out of tribalism then Obama would never have won those states.

I said "most," not "all." A 25 point swing among white voters in the rust belt does not come anywhere close to disproving "most."

Trump would have lost if he lost 80,000 votes in three states that could swing the electoral college. That doesn't sound as big a swing as 25 points.

Why not? Trump didn't win them by much, but it can still be a big swing if Obama won these states by a lot. A quick google shows that this appears to be the case.

Trump may have won michigan by only 10k votes, but Obama had a margin of half a million in 2012.

Sad that, it seems, any political comment with a spark of humour on here is voted down.

From G.K. Chesterton: "A critic once remonstrated with me saying, with an air of indignant reasonableness, “If you must make jokes, at least you need not make them on such serious subjects.” I replied with a natural simplicity and wonder, “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” It is quite useless to talk about profane jesting. All jesting is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all.

... The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is not a careless joke. The thing which is fundamentally and really frivolous is a careless solemnity. If Mr. McCabe really wishes to know what sort of guarantee of reality and solidity is afforded by the mere act of what is called talking seriously, let him spend a happy Sunday in going the round of the pulpits. Or, better still, let him drop in at the House of Commons or the House of Lords. Even Mr. McCabe would admit that these men are solemn — more solemn than I am. And even Mr. McCabe, I think, would admit that these men are frivolous — more frivolous than I am. Why should Mr. McCabe be so eloquent about the danger arising from fantastic and paradoxical writers? Why should he be so ardent in desiring grave and verbose writers? There are not so very many fantastic and paradoxical writers. But there are a gigantic number of grave and verbose writers; and it is by the efforts of the grave and verbose writers that everything that Mr. McCabe detests (and everything that I detest, for that matter) is kept in existence and energy. How can it have come about that a man as intelligent as Mr. McCabe can think that paradox and jesting stop the way? It is solemnity that is stopping the way in every department of modern effort. It is his own favourite “serious methods;” it is his own favourite “momentousness;” it is his own favourite “judgment” which stops the way everywhere." - from Heretics, 1905

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.xvi.html

I know this is a joke and I also think American gun laws could need some adjustment.

That said what I've always been told is to start with myself: maybe my "opponents" are dumb.

That doesn't help anything but my ego.

Instead I'd recommend looking into common ground or another way to present my arguments.

I disagree deeply with a good number of you but still I think most of you don’t realize most of the time since I either shut up or at least present my views somewhat carefully in the hope that someone might get some inspiration.

I've also changed my own, long held opinions on certain topics (e.g. drug policy) not because anyone here ridiculed me but because somebody took the time to explain instead of shouting troll, downvoting and flagging.

I wish more people here would opt for that solution.

Yeah, I probably phrased my post overly provocatively but I wasn't trying to be funny, just logical. And thank you for a reasoned and courteous response. My thoughts were:

1) Mass shootings are horrific, and it seems insane that anyone can own an assault rifle with such low barriers, but at the same time, death from gun violence is statistically low compared to, say, auto accidents. If being in favour of stricter gun regulation to save a few tens of thousand of lives (in a country of hundreds of millions) means alienating a huge percentage of the population, then why not let that one slide. Things will be no worse than they are now.

2) Many people (certainly me) would say that abortion is a woman's right but even if abortion is illegal, back street abortions will still take place. They may be in unsanitory and dangerous conditions, and some deaths will result. But again, statistically speaking, that will only impact a small percentage of the population.

3) Climate change however, seems like it presents an existential danger that could wipe us out as a species. Our growth driven economies seem unequipped to deal with this ultimate tragedy of the commons. Statistically, it will kill 100% of us, or severely degrade our grandchildren's lives, unless we somehow get our shit together on a global scale.

To use a crappy analogy, imagine we're all locked inside a giant container with limited air. There's a blocked air vent at the top, which we can only reach of we all stand on each other's shoulders - i.e. cooperate.

In such circumstances, why continue bickering over what music we should play while we wait for suffocation? Surely it would be better to listen to the other guys music, if it got him onside, and allowed us to move away from our tribal stances and work together on some action against the common threat.

While climate change is extremely serious, I don’t think there are any models that show it causing human extinction. The second half of your statement is more accurate to show degradation. But pairing it with extinction makes it harder to see your point through the hyperbole.

If only those gun violence victims knew they were more likely to die in an auto accident, that would totally change things. Are you saying the effects of both should only be taken as death statistics?

The effects of mass shootings isn't just about the amount of people killed. It's about the anxiety it creates nationally or globally. That's basically what makes terrorism so powerful, but it's not as easy to measure those effects and what they can lead to.

Are you kidding? Progressives openly reject science when it doesn't fit their ideology. We saw that with the response to Damore.

You don't know why Damore was fired and neither does anyone else publicly know. His 'manifesto' is a poorly written rant that leaves holes for people to project their ideology onto, like you are right now. What he wrote was neither progressive nor even conservative, but a naive, meandering diatribe with cherry-picked evidence, all of which would have been water under the bridge if it wasn't blown up by a slow press cycle.

Here is Stanford Medical school on the subject, from just this past Spring: http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...

And a highly cited study from 2013 addressing Damore's topic directly: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...

The evidence is not 'cherry picked'. It is abundant, comprehensively researched, and well replicated. Take a trip to Google Scholar yourself. It is certainly not 'fringe'. That's why the public reaction was so absurd. Damore was fired for exactly the type of phenomenon Sam Altman is talking about in this post.

Neither of these links you provide have to do with Damore's rant, nor are they mentioned in his claims.

Damore wasn't arguing that men's and women's bodies were different - he was taking papers about biological differences and stretching them to supporting his unfounded claims that social differences are based on biology, not social constructs, because he was upset at Google's programs that fight social biases. Some of his citations are cherry picked nonsense, for example the big five analyses saying women are neurotic [1], which have been discredited as being weak lexical factor analysis that can't be attributed to biology [2] (like gender).

The fact that you think these papers are relevant to Damore's memo just further proves the vagueness of his diatribe, and demonstrates your own willingness to project your own views onto it.

[1] https://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/

The first link is an article from Stanford Medicine on the overwhelming evidence for the evolved biological cognitive differences between men and women, how this shapes their interests and average cognitive strengths. It's not a paper, it's a comprehensive review of the research presented to inform the public. Did you even read it?

> There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys...

The second link is about the advantage men have in mechanical reasoning and how it likely contributes to their representation in STEM fields. It's the title of the paper.

Observational correlation != causation. If you had read the articles you'd posted, you see that neither of them claim attributable biological causes to differences in gender behavior and social biases.

From the Stanford article (which is not peer reviewed):

>Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”

Yet again, Damore's paper wasn't making the argument that observational biological differences exist, the point of which you've missed because you're eagerly still trying to prove it right now. Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong, and he cherry picked specific data and stretched evidence to falsely support his viewpoint. Which, in context to this thread, is still neither progressive nor conservative and continuing to be proven vague.

> Damore's diatribe was that Google's combating of social bias was wrong

No, it wasn't. In fact, the exact opposite: he literally says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that ... we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases".

Damore didn't reference your [1] to quote that "women are neurotic", he used it to quote that "greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits".

Your [2] doesn't even cite [1], and in any case, [1] has almost 800 citations, while [2] is only cited by the author herself in her other papers. Seems like a stretch to call [1] "discredited".

[2] is the one of the most recent criticisms of the Big Five method, which is the crux used in [1]. If [2] cited every paper that used the Big Five method incorrectly as biological factor analysis, it would be in the hundreds.

Number of citations is terrible metric to defend a paper because the reason [2] has less citations is because [2] was published 3 years ago, while [1] was published almost a decade ago.

Appeals to popularity are logic fallacies for a reason.

[1] had almost 100 citation in its first 3 years, while [2] still has no citation by anyone else other than its author. If [2] really had discredited an entire field of research, I'd imagine that anyone at all would talk about it even once.

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

You are bringing up paper which had literally zero impact in 3 years it's been out. Why should I waste time reading it? Clearly, no scientist who has ever read it has found it worth to even mention it. The burden to show that it is relevant is on you.

I really wish Silicon Valley was a place where a man's ideas could be critiqued without the need to attack the man.

You have the base for a really good argument that could sway people who are on the fence about the issue but when you say things like "vagueness of his diatribe" you alienate the people you want to change the most.

Trump used and continues to use racial dog whistles in his speeches and official tweets. It's part of the reason 90-95 percent of African Americans vote for anyone else over a GOP candidate given the opportunity - if you hear it, it's hard to accept anything else from that speaker. Trump got close to the same vote percentages as historical GOP presidential candidates, Trump is not special in that people departed from their normal behavior to vote for him in some large silent wave.

I don't mean to be trite, but are you saying this person voted for Trump to "own the libs"?

Doing something out of spite like that is a pretty miserable experience...

> are you saying this person voted for Trump to "own the libs"?

No, that's not what I said nor is it what I implied. He voted for Trump because, among other reasons, he thought Mrs. Clinton was a terrible candidate and would make a terrible president, and he personally weighed that more heavily than what he knew of Trumps disadvantages.

I don't agree with that assessment, but it is reasonable.

>I think that a pretty big chunk of Trump's votes came from people who would otherwise not have voted for him...but did so because they sensed, correctly, that their thoughts, ideas and voices were being marginalized (and demonized) by progressives.

I read that as "we wouldn't vote for Trump, but did anyways because of how progressives see us". Maybe I misread this.

> I read that as "we wouldn't vote for Trump, but did anyways because of how progressives see us". Maybe I misread this.

Yep. I know a great many people who voted for that reason. They felt marginalized, and their vote was the only way they could strike back - because talking could ruin their lives.

Besides how you feel about it, how does your friend feel about it? Have his expectations been met?

I believe that he feels like he made a mistake.