James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google
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Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech.
I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. I also see people hired who are minorities but also great at their job. It's not a binary pattern. But those who are hired just because they are a POC or female, yet are terrible at their job stand out. People notice it, but few say it.
Our company recently hired a black woman as a "Software Engineer" who can't write a SQL statement. She has a "taken some tutorials" level of programming skill as far as I have noticed and produces things very, very slow. People notice this, and it makes them angry. I'm sure the other engineers talk about this even more when I'm not in the room. Our boss is proud of how much he is "making the team diverse" yet it's only going to cause problems for the team.
I like to think I was hired based on my skillset, not to improve the numbers. I've worked hard to get here. People likely forget or don't care how "diverse" I am when I am working because I produce. And I fully support bringing in diverse candidates, it's essential to get those viewpoints, so long as they are a qualified candidate to start with.
I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. Almost all of the women from my social circle are smart, pragmatic, driven and successful yet have zero interest in a technical career. They excel in their given industries but ours they want no part of. I don't believe intelligence is more prevalent in either gender, but I do believe there are some traits that shape who we are.
That's something that's rarely addressed, for fear of being ostracized.
As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
That's most definitely a cultural thing, and I believe its what diversity programs try to address.
> As far as his "conservative white male" discrimination claims, I've seen that too. My boss specifically requested candidates that are not middle-aged white males. But it's nowhere near the same level of discrimination that people of color or women have endured for decades. Perhaps the reason people don't feel sorry for conservative white males is that if they are rejected by one company they can keep trying and will find an "old school" company that will hire them. We have not had that luxury, for blacks and women it was 100 nos for every 1 yes. It's not that way for white guys, sorry.
I get that, but I think your boss was still wrong to think and phrase of it that way. No one should be disqualified simply because of their race or age. Give more points to minorities? Yes definitely. But reducing points because you're of a certain race and age just sounds icky, and is probably illegal.
Social skills are a thing, even if they're logically equivalent statements.
If it's a cultural thing, why is one version (attitude/culture) towards it considered better than the other (and thus one has to be "addressed")?
If it is a cultural thing, then surely the correct response is not to mandate gender balance in corporate hiring practices, but to alter the education and socialization of girls. Whether it is cultural or biological, the results are the same: fewer women have the interest to excel in specific fields. App Camp for Girls might be a better approach than diversity hiring.
Although at the same time and despite being pretty far right on the political spectrum, I think there is some truth to the idea that big companies "should" hire visible minorities over and above those that are fully qualified, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of legitimately qualified people, or that it causes significant harm to product quality.
The hard truth is if you only hire white guys from Stanford you've got a ton of overlap in their background and the way they think. If you only hire black women from Somalia it's the same. You're going to have significant similarities. Making teams more diverse is extremely important and beneficial as long as all are otherwise qualified.
Designers, sure, it's very eqsy to think of examples where diverse backgrounds improve business outcomes. But let's not pretend that there is any difference in business outcomes if Foxconn's assembly lines snapping iPhone parts together are entirely Chinese hands vs if they were to equally represent all members of the united nations.
Asserting that there is a benefit needs to be seriously qualified, as it can certainly be everything ranging from a benefit, to negligible, to an actual handicap.
Could you elaborate a little more about its "ugliness"?
Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.
Not really. I have a lot of faith in our engineering staff so I wonder how he got hired and how he avoids getting fired. The uncomfortable truth is that if he was an employee that "looked good" I would know the answer to those questions.
It's not specifically gender or racial bias either. We ran a study of 700 candidates for a role, running regular hiring against blind assessment and found that the major difference for that role in that organisation was socio-economic... they'd been excluding great candidates who went to less prestigious universities.
Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.
In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them.
Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place.
So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.
One could speak of someone having more skill than another, but if both skillsets have no value, it doesn't really matter.
I'd wager a third of the nodejs "developer community" could be described that way. The key thing is was she hired to write sql queries?
Except, make 'technical management' decisions like "we should use mongodb because it's web-scale".
I think this is untrue. I know a lot of male "sofware engineers" who are totally incompetent and remain well employed.
I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.
If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.
I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - on her last day after several years of working in the org and ask me what her email address is.
Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.
Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.
And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.
I don't present my situation as anything more than anecdotal, it's just what I've noticed. And to answer your question no the manager does not treat male developers the same way, they're held to a higher standard. In fact the "middle-aged white male" has to be above average at this particular company to be kept on.
Oh yes. Especially if you work in, say, a big financial corporation- the kind of large, monolithic organisation that isn't a technology company, per se, but uses technology (as only a large monolith would). In that kind of place, you can expect the majority of "technical" employees to be largely uninterested in, and therefore fairly clueless about, technology (i.e. they're just in it to jump over to tech management roles down the line). So, software engineers who can't write SQL queries are a thing. A common, inescepable fact of life, indeed.
I would not like to say whether I'm speaking of personal experience with such organisations. It wouldn't be proper.
If you just base it on what you see, yes. But if you're partial to top brass interviews and conversations about getting this or that person to pad diversity, and of talk about overlooking skills since "we need more X", then no (of course that would still be partial knowledge of the overall state of the market).
I have met plenty of white men who have masters level CS education, have worked for Google and other top name companies, and can't produce a line of useful working code to save their lives.
The reasons why corporations frequently hire people who don't actually produce anything are varied and complex, but it happens, a lot.
If someone is incompetent and also happens to be from a minority group then everyone starts complaining about how they are a "diversity hire" but with incompetent white males they just shrug and go "that's the way it is." In other words, it is so common with white males that no one even notices.
Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming.
[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourna...
[2] https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/18271/is-james-dam...
"23. Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year.
24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google.
25. Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google."
> Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance
How are these ratings done, by the team/manager or externally? IME when it's done by the same team then reviews are more about politics than performance.
when Damore speaks out against politics affecting hiring and promotion, he is wrong
I'm fascinated how one can reconcile both beliefs
So I'd still like to see his code. And talk with some of his coworkers.
Also, sweeping assertions like "had no reason" assume facts not in evidence. We mainly don't know what happened at Google. Or why he didn't complete his PhD. We have only heard his side of the story, and only part of that.
> We mainly don't know what happened at Google.
We don't, beyond public evidence (including one in the lawsuit and outside). But that evidence we do have, and it does not align with your presumption that Damore was poor performer, unless you accept a completely invented premise that all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews and performance evaluations, but he was still unhappy and decided to push the diversity angle to achieve... I don't know what, getting fired from a job where everybody, according to you, were going out of the way to make him happy? I don't think this is a workable hypothesis, and certainly not one that bears minimal skeptical scrutiny.
You can't be called "skeptical" if you only mistrust evidence which does not fit your preconception, but accept and even invent one that fits one. That's not skepticism, that's agenda.
> all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews and performance evaluations.
Oh, do you have copies of those? I would like to see them, too thanks. Otherwise, you don't have much in the way of evidence that those exist. You have a proven liar about performance making claims about performance. He could be correct in this case, or he could be lying again.
> all his peers in Google somehow colluded to fake his reviews
Have you ever been part of a performance review process? Even the best-designed ones are imperfect and political. Sometimes not-very-good people get promoted. Sometimes very good people don't. I have heard a number of stories from Google pals of people energetically trying to manipulate the process.
When it's my job to read performance reviews and promotion packets, I take them with a grain of salt. I look at work output and actually talk with people. Which is all I'm saying I'd like to do here. Maybe Damore really is competent. Maybe he isn't. I'd like to see for myself.
No, he did not lie about this. You are lying about it. His linkedin listed him as having been part of a PhD program and people took it to mean he had a PhD. There is absolutely no evidence he ever intended to mislead anyone about this.
So, please stop spreading lies.
====
Note the business insider article you linked uses these weasel words:
James Damore, the fired Google engineer who wrote the now-infamous memo on diversity at the company, has removed mention of PhD studies in biology from his LinkedIn profile.
The removal comes after Wired writer Nitasha Tiku confirmed with Harvard that Damore has not completed his PhD.
He then goes on to call out the "Right-wing argument" appealing to his credibility because he had a PhD.
If you read carefully, you'll see that they frame as if it was this embarassing thing that they'd shamed him into doing, to encourage lazy, non-critical readers to reach the same conclusion that you did, while using the technically correct words to avoid defamation liability. But, careful analysis of the facts shows that I am correct. He did not lie about the PhD, others either lied on his behalf without his knowledge; or were confused by careless/overly-optimistic reading of the LinkedIn profile.
So at the very best, his resume was misleading because he was incompetent at putting together a resume. That doesn't jibe with the theory that he's so very brilliant. The fact that he quickly edited it when called out confirms even he saw it as misleading; that he didn't comment or apologize suggests it was not a simple mistake.
Ah, and now that I go look for images, it did not list him as being part of a PhD *program". it just said "PhD, Systems Biology" under education:
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/598b0f3776084a30198...
I'm glad to hear you weren't misled by that thanks to your expertise, but there's no denying that is misleading to a general-audience reader.
1. Damore truthfully specified he's a PhD student
2. You (I assume innocently) and others (some innocently, some maliciously) misconstrued this as a claim that he has a PhD degree
3. Despite Linkedin information being completely true and whole error being contained in your bad reading alone, you and others called Damore a liar.
4. Damore removed that true information to avoid further confusion
5. You construe it as a proof that Damore was a liar, since if he removed completely truthful information that some people misread and used it against him, he must have intended to mislead from the start, and that's why he specified his PhD student status exactly as it truly was.
6. This also proves Damore was incompetent, since he wrote his Linkedin page in a way that a hostile or inattentive reader was able to misunderstand his page where it suited his preexisting notions, which would never happen if Damore was any good at writing Linkedin pages, as it is known that well-written (or merely competently written) Linkedin page is impossible to misread or misinterpret, no matter how much you try.
7. This is further proven by the image, since Linkedin design and forms do not allow to distinguish incomplete PhD study in progress from a finished one and display merely a length of the study but not the completion status, clearly Damore intended to mislead by using the only options available in the Linkedin interface.
This sounds like extremely tortured logic aimed at arriving at predetermined conclusion that Damore is a bad person. Looks like you're continuing to mine for something that explains why Damore is a bad person (failing at the premise he's a bad programmer above), to avoid addressing what he said on merits - since if he's a bad person, he can't be right on merits, obviously, no bad person has ever said anything true.
Note, you don't have to address it if you don't want to, but if you do, personal attack is not the best way to go, even if a very common one.
My argument is that if in LinkedIn's education section you list a school and a degree -- which he did -- people take that to mean you have the degree. Ergo, he falsely claimed to have a degree he didn't.
Could that be an accident? Might it just be incompetence? Maybe. But given that he also falsely claimed on his resume to be a chess master, I think the simple explanation is that he lied about both.
That he then quickly removed things when called out with neither explanation nor apology fits in with the "lies to make himself look good" narrative. A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.
Your thing about LinkedIn form design seems to be pure fiction. I just checked: you can enter any text you like, including no text at all. People without a degree don't have to put a degree in. I spent an entire 3 minutes looking at examples, and people fill in all sorts of things, including "PhD Candidate" and "PhD Student (incomplete)" to make it clear they are not claiming the degree.
This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
That's what he did! That is, that's what he did when someone finally got around to asking him about it in an environment where he trusted that he'd be given time to say his side in an unedited manner, which does not include any of the hit pieces you have linked. I believe it's mentioned in his interview with Jordan Peterson, which is the first public interview he gave.
Again you are blaming him for your own error.
This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
First, it is absolutely a personal attack. You're attacking his character and coding ability, which are not relevant to the topic. Ok, technically, you're passively suggesting it via speculative commentary but it amounts to the same thing.
Second, your inferences aren't reasonable, and they're unreasonable in exactly the manner that one would predict based on consumption of inflammatory and deliberately misleading propaganda aimed primarily at smearing Damore. For example, you inferred that he "didn't say anything or apologize," apparently relying on entirely on hostile bloggers to convey that message to you on his behalf. Remember that until this blew up, he was a private individual. He has no platform of his own and no way to offer any response that your chosen sources did not provide to you. So it is completely and utterly unreasonable to hold him accountable in such a way.
Furthermore, the fixation with LinkedIn is unreasonable. LinkedIn profiles are notoriously unreliable and many are neglected and incomplete, since many members are not actively seeking employment (yet retain membership for the social networking). If you had looked at Damore's whole profile rather than just the image, it was clear that not much effort had been put into it. This is consistent with his story that he had not been actively seeking employment when Google offered him an interview based on his Chess playing.
Which brings us to the chess issue. And yes, it seems that Damore stated on his resume that he's a FIDE Master, a term of art that it seems clear that he misused. Specifically he wrote "FIDE Master in Chess (>99th Percentile)". Other claims about chess-playing on his resume seem to check out as far as I can tell[0][1]. So yes, it's an interesting question why does he say that on his resume. I have not found an explanation, but can certainly think of others not mentioned in that stackexchange link, such as he misunderstood proper use of the term. Obviously a mistake, one that shouldn't be made, but nothing like the dishonesty you're accusing him of, especially when you give him no opportunity to explain himself.
Meanwhile, in this obsession with minor errors in an inexperienced young person's first resume or linkedin profile(errors that are easily cleared-up in a phone interview if you actually care), you are apparently giving a pass to someone who anonymously leaked a co-workers' fair and well-reasoned internal posting to outrage media to encourage hit pieces and start a witch hunt. ... which ultimately resulted in the employer being hit with a ton of negative press and a high-profile lawsuit.
So, no, your inferences are not remotely reasonable or appropriate by my estimation.
[0] http://www.uschess.org/results/2003/nya/?page=WINNERS&xsecti...
[1] I don't know what "Board 1 and Conference Champion" means, and "Rise of Nations" is a PC strategy game.
The irony is that in the lawsuit damore filed, he outright names a bunch of people who work at Google and have said various levels of innocent comments. He's leaked out internal information to outrage media in order to punish and start a witch hunt. I've already seen combinations of images containing information about said named employees float around the more witch hunt-y side of the internet.
Also, there's a bit of difference between "Let's discuss whether diversity is done right in Google" and "I will keep hounding you until one of us fired. Fuck you" (real quote), "We are at a point where the dialogue we need to be having with these people is ‘if you keep talking about this shit, i will hurt you." (again real quote), "We should be willing to give a wink and a nod to other Silicon Valley employers over terminable offenses" (trying to make your opponents unemployable), “You’re being blacklisted by people at companies outside of Google,” and, of course, "How do you let people know you don’t take their ideas seriously? … No-platforming fascists does scale. So does punching one on camera." and "Get in touch with your friendly local antifa" - this one is especially juicy as a lot of people insanely called what Damore did "violence" but then turn around and literally endorse actual physical violence.
You also ignore the selective censorship of usernames going on, when he could've censored all the names to ignore igniting any potential witch hunts. Can you provide an explanation for this? He could've shown the pattern without putting other people at risk.
I made no error in parsing his LinkedIn. He may have made an error in writing it, but the common interpretation for what he wrote is that he was claiming a PhD.
I'm glad you finally admit he did the same thing on his resume. Again, there could be an innocent explanation for it, but the reasonable inference is that he said what he meant. If he would like to correct the record on this topic, he's welcome to publish something explaining.
His character and coding ability are both relevant to the topics at hand, his advocacy and subsequent lawsuit lawsuit. The former speaks to his reliability; both speak to motivation. As does, now that you mention it, the fact that the interviews he gave were to right-wing antifeminists.
I also think it's hilarious that when talking about his apparent resume fraud, he's a delicate "inexperienced young person", but when coding and opining on diversity programs he's a brilliant genius who has never done a thing wrong. You're straining at gnats and swallowing camels here.
People that read that are wrong (at least sometimes), since Linkedin shows degrees-in-progress and completed degrees the same way. Not ideal interface, for sure, but that's what it is. People that do not know that make mistakes. It's their mistake.
> Could that be an accident? Might it just be incompetence? Maybe.
Surely, it may be incompetence - not understanding how Linkedin profile works. But it's not Damore's incompetence.
> That he then quickly removed things when called out with neither explanation nor apology
If people misunderstood what was on his Linkedin page, and undeservedly called him a liar and attacked him for that, and he removed the controversial item despite it being true - I think demanding apology from him for you misunderstanding him and falsely calling him a liar is taking the entitlement thing too far. If somebody owes an apology, it's people who called him a liar despite him publishing completely true information - but of course I do not hold by breath for that.
> fits in with the "lies to make himself look good" narrative.
Surely it fits your narrative. The problem is it is not true.
> A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.
Nobody owes you feeling bad for telling the truth and you misunderstanding him. It would be nice if people who did the misunderstanding felt bad and did not blame others for their mistake, but I recognize this is not how the Internet works. If you misunderstood something, it's other guy who should be feeling bad for not working harder to prevent any chance of you making a mistake. The other guy is always responsible, he's clearly either a liar or an idiot for letting you to misunderstand him.
> Your thing about LinkedIn form design seems to be pure fiction. I just checked: you can enter any text you like, including no text at all.
That misunderstanding thing happened to you again. I haven't said you cannot enter free text in Linkedin. I said the form does not have completion status for education. Yes, you can hack around that by adding various text to a degree program name or any other field. If Damore knew in advance there would be a mob of hostile attackers scrutinizing everything he ever did under a microscope to find even a tiniest flaw and blow it up out of proportion, he would probably do it too. But he just wrote true facts about his educational record, without thinking about being extra defensive and using tools given to him by Linkedin. Linkedin provides tools to set beginning and end time for educational record, and program name, but does not have a setting for "incomplete" or "in progress" status.
> This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.
You "reasonable inferences" - which, as far as blaming others for your misunderstanding goes are not reasonable at all - are what is the personal attack, since they seek to impugn Damore's character without addressing his actual arguments. That's the definition of personal attack.
When you mislead an individual in real life and that person suffers actual consequences from that mistake, apology and forgiveness help repair the relationship.
A media hack writing about this has not suffered a real interpersonal offense over the issue, nor have any of the self-righteous audience passing judgment. As these people have not suffered any actual harm they are not owed an apology, nor would an apology given under such circumstances function as it is supposed to. There is no interpersonal relationship to repair in the first place.
Anyhow, publishing something on the web invites anybody to look at it whenever they please. Putting a profile on a site specifically made for people to evaluate your professional standing is very much inviting people to look at it when they want to know who you are. That is literally the purpose of LinkedIn.
S: There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry.
wpietri: Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not good at programming.
You brought up Damore after the parent mentioned "shitty white male programmers". You speculated that you'd expect to discover that he was a bad programmer.
I'd like to see what wpietri's home life looks like. Based on his comments in this thread, I would not be surprised to discover that he's a terrible parent and has a bad relationship with his children.
Would you not find that a completely offensive and uncalled for personal attack? But I didn't lie! It wasn't an attack! It's not technically slander or libel or defamation, and technically is what matters. I just stated what I wanted to see and speculated based on some reasonable inferences. Oh, you don't think my inferences are reasonable? Prove it.
But no, I wouldn't think it offensive if it were relevant to the topic at hand. Which it isn't in your imaginary version. And if you're upset about the "shitty white male programmers thing", take it up with the person who wrote it, but it wasn't me. I just said I wanted to see his code so I could see what kind of programmer he is.
Regardless, if that's the best you have, I think we can conclude I said nothing that is either slander or defamation. You accusing me of doing so, ironically, appears to be defamation. I look forward to the effusive apology you apparently believe due in such situations.
None of your criticism of Damore was relevant. You just jumped on a bandwagon of hate. You picked up a pitchfork and joined a witch hunt. Gaston held up a picture of The Beast and told him he was coming in the night to get your children, and you joined the mindless mob.
I know that I will not be able to convince you now, because your mind is stubbornly closed. Your ego is too sensitive to admit that you have no valid justification for your denigration of Damore. All I hope is that someday, you'll be able to recognize a witch hunt for what it is and resist the urge be swept up in the pathetic, cowardly, petty hate-mongering.
That is exactly what people do on paper resumes, which also let you type what you want. Why? Because falsely claiming (or even giving the impression of claiming) an academic degree is a giant no-no. People get fired for that.
You repeatedly ignore that he also falsely claimed to be a chess master. Is your theory there that it was also just an accident, forced by software? That the word processor somehow made him put "FIDE Master in Chess (>99th Percentile)" and that he as a computer expert just couldn't figure out any other way to use the tool?
I'm not the one fitting a narrative here, pal. I see your DARVO.
It does.
> LinkedIn lets you type what you want.
It also does, it doesn't contradict the previous sentence. As I said, Linked in does not have data item for degree being complete or not (I am not sure how familiar you are with data modeling, but situation of having a model for some property and deriving it from ad-hoc texts in unrelated data items are very different). Some people do extra work by using degree name or other fields to work around this, some don't bother. Neither are liars.
> That is exactly what people do on paper resumes, which also let you type what you want.
No, that's a very different case. Paper resume is completely freeform. Linkedin has set of forms, some of which are free text, which you can use - if you want to - to cover for shortcomings in other places, like use degree or program name to express completion status. Some don't bother to because they think it's be clear from context. Sometimes it is not. It happens. It'd be good to recognize that.
> Because falsely claiming (or even giving the impression of claiming) an academic degree is a giant no-no. People get fired for that.
People get fired for all kinds of things, like expressing unpopular opinion, as it turns out. But there's world of difference between claiming the degree on resume (which didn't happen) and somebody misreading ambiguous output of a site.
> You repeatedly ignore that he also falsely claimed to be a chess master.
Why I should address this unrelated claim before we address the one at point? If you admit you were wrong on the Linkedin part - and recognize the fact both claims are personal attacks, since they have little to do with the claims Damore is making or you were making - we can consider the chess thing. Before that it's just a distraction - what about this? what about that? what about that third thing? forget that I didn't prove the first two, what about the fourth thing? Nope, won't work this way. You have to substantiate every one of your claims, not just bring a new one once previous one was questioned.
> I see your DARVO.
You are implying that you're somehow a victim here? Nice one. So far you are the one denying the facts (as in, ones about Damore's performance) and personally attacking him (as in, bringing irrelevant claims about his character to discussion about his factual claims), and of course claiming that somebody here is "offender", without any proof of offense made - unless you consider you misunderstanding Damore's Linkedin profile as "offense" to you and you being "victim"? That'd be rich. The fact that you have a nice acronym in your pocket doesn't change any of that.
Spare me the condescension on data modeling. LinkedIn barely has a data model; it is a modestly structured version of a resume, with a bunch of free text fields. It is not a "very different case". People will often ask for "a resume or a LinkedIn link" in job applications because they serve the same purpose. LinkedIn will automatically render your LinkedIn profile in resume form. They are in practice the same.
And in either case, if you say "PhD, Systems Biology, Harvard" in the education section, reasonable people will believe you claim to have a PhD. That's how I read it. That's how many people read it. And if you did a user test, I'm sure that's how most people would read it. That anonymous Damore fanboys now claim they'd read it differently is not proof of anything about the wider world.
You can claim that it was a mistake on his part (and others have), or that his documented social ineptitude (as his fellow students talked about) mean that he just didn't understand the social implications of what he wrote. But then you would have to grapple with the other lie on his resume, which is why you are spinning so vigorously away from it.
I am not denying any "facts" about Damore's performance. I agree he worked at Google and didn't get fired for a while. I agree that he claims his performance was great. Those are facts. As I said at the beginning of this thread, I'd like to see that for myself. People who lie on resumes are not trustworthy sources for their job performance.
I call bullshit. Show me three examples of people "getting fired for giving the impression of claiming they had a PhD on LinkedIn" when there's a plausible case to be made that it was an innocent mistake with at least equal blame on the reader.
I just looked at my LinkedIn profile, which I haven't updated in at least 2 or 3 years, probably more. For reasons I don't know, it lists two entries for my education.
[UNIVERSITY XYZ]
Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science, [Second Major]
[YEAR] - [YEAR + 4]
[UNIVERSITY XYZ]
Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science
[YEAR] - [YEAR + 4]
Damned if I know. Did I intend for it to be confusing? Certainly not, I'm sure I just filled out the forms with what I thought the program could work with and would make sense. Maybe I used some Wizard-style Q&A format that they don't use anymore. I really have no clue at all. But there it is, ready for someone to screencap and use to embarrass me if they wanted to, mocking my apparent inability to create a properly formatted LinkedIn profile.
I also note that there's nothing filled in for "description" or "activities" or anything like that. When I was young and did not have much of a resume of relevant accomplishments in my work history, I often included, on my paper resume, an honor society membership and an elected treasurer position I'd held for two semesters in a student group. These seem like details I would have added to LinkedIn, had the interface had a section for it(as it does now). But there isn't anything there. Did I remove them? Did I just never bother to add them? Or was the "activities, etc." field added to the schema after I created my profile? Certainly, the javascript-based interactive editor available now, was not the editor I used when I originally created my profile.
What I do know is that I've never directed anyone to my LinkedIn profile. I've never encouraged an employer to review it and the only interactions I've had come from former co-workers and recruiters. At this point I consider it more of a professional obligation than anything else, and log in every so often mostly to check messages and update endorsements.
I also know that I've seen work histories that look really weird, often when people work in multiple positions at the same company for years but that company also changes ownership multiple times. So you have a bizarrely fragmented presentation of a story I know to be fairly simple. Something like "was hired entry-level, switched departments, got promoted, and is now Senior Account Manager for Whatever domain" winds up looking like a career with 5 different positions on 4 different teams in 3 different companies. I consider that to be a decent indication that many people either don't spend a lot of time on their profiles, or else find the interface cumbersome enough that they're unwilling to deal with it long enough to convey a real resume-style work history.
There is no plausible claim that the reader is to blame here. If you show his entry, sans name, to 100 people asking them what degrees he claims, I'd be that at least 90 would say he had a PhD and a BS. Just as people looking at his current LinkedIn profile would understand he now claims an MS.
You could be right this is definitely a possibility. I did not intend to suggest that all white male programmers are awesome, certainly not the case.
I would prefer it if all of us could leave gender/race/religion at the door and talk but that's now the how the internet works now.
I agree on the data thing. I think when you get down to the bottom of things, lumping people under a label and treating them as a cohesive unit is part of the problem. If that’s true, getting permission from a small cohort of that group is still bad, because you’re assuming if these three people are okay with it then it’s okay.
It’s that incident with Chevy Chase and the n-word that started this line of thought for me. I don’t care if Richard Pryor said it was okay. He is one voice. Don’t act surprised if other people don’t agree. Being surprised means you’ve already decided all black people are the same and a sample size of one means you’re okay to do something.
Or, people can learn to read and act on the content of an argument rather than immediately trying to discredit someone with appeals to popular bigotry.
But in general, telling someone they've been a jerk all their life leads to certain existential crises that they will do just about anything to avoid.
People don't just get defensive, they get cruel. There's a whole group of tricks that are basically gaslighting the person. They take an aggressively "reasonable" stance and trying to convince the person they're crazy and it's all them.
Because this happens often enough that many of these 'overtures' are obvious, it makes interacting with moderates a waste of time. I've seen person after person get DDOSed by a handful of people throwing walls of text at them but really just tangenting the conversation off into oblivion.
So when someone who is actually in your group takes a moderate position, unless you know them personally, you can't know if they're really a moderate or just a troll. That's not to say you spend effort on people at the extremes, it just means you are hesitant about overly-moderate people the way you are about people asking you for help on a street corner. You've tried it before and it's a scam so often you don't even want to make eye contact.
Ah, everybody's a bigot but the actual bigots
more about that incident: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/wilfrid-lau...
this is the same university that gave away a pay raise based on gender: http://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-pay-rais... That ended up in some female professors that were hired in the same time as some male professors having a higher pay after the raise even though they were paid the same before it.
Also nobody ever seems to ask: diversity of what exactly? What's the target? Life experience? There is no qualitative score for that, nor is any single person's life more or less interesting and influential than anyone else.
The only thing we can objectively and accurately measure is merit, motivation, and results, and we should use those metrics alone for hiring and advancement, in addition to fighting subjective bias (like removing names and photos from resumes) and making sure there's equivalent opportunity for anyone to try. After that, it would be best if just let people do what they want to do and move on.
Clearly not when every company recruits from the same 10 schools.
We all want smartest, more capable and most reliable people, not a mix of smart and average and dumb just to "represent". Picking the top schools aligns for that, as long as your competitive enough to hire them.
However, if that's what you want to believe then more power to you. Hire whoever you want. I'm just agreeing with OP that the target of diversity programs is decidedly not to get diversity of life experience -- because there are much better ways to attain that than hiring by skin color or gender.
Otherwise, in-state tuition probably can't be a factor.
I don’t know to what extent this is true, or even how to measure it, but it would help explain why “diversity” initiatives seems so illogical some times, which has perplexed me too.
Perhaps a willingness to have a dialogue
Much like how when debating the advocacy for a higher education degree I have heard people defend the effort as evidence to accept direction and a capacity to see something through to the end
I think there is merit in what of my own opinion I recognise in your commenting critically of diversity efforts
gp> Diversity based on outward appearance is one of the most convoluted and ridiculous movements ever.
Namely, that you think people should be met with openness and that contemporary diversity efforts seem to restrict that openness
But I feel that is using individual logic on systems
I think the proponents of diversity efforts would most likely support individual openness as well because they also recognise the systemic structures that currently restrict that openness
Like how a degree implies broad connotation about your ability to be a professional in a field when only representing a fraction of what real experience you will utilise in that profession
These diversity efforts seem to be implying generalised correlation to identify inequalities that are restricting universal openness and modifying their behaviour to remove the identifier
Or perhaps they are showing they are willing to use legal measures if exclusive minds refuse to recognise the data supporting "The only thing we can objectively and accurately measure"
> Appearance and other unchangeable physical traits? How unfortunate since they have nothing to do with interests, abilities, or character.
As GP pointed out, companies aren't really after that.
When a company does not discriminate on race or gender, it generally stays silent about it, because "not actively discriminating" is just normal hiring on merit. When a company boasts about their diversity program, there's a strategy behind it. Maybe it's because the management believes increasing diversity beyond the industry distribution creates a better working environment (as you indirectly point out, the connection here is speculative). Or maybe they know it's good PR, and also a diverse workplace creates a nice CYA for the company in case of a disgruntled employee filing in a bullshit harassment lawsuit.
Jon Stewart gave a post-retirement interview in which he talked about this issue in the comedy world. He initially wrote off criticism of the lack of diversity in the writer's room for The Daily Show, since he always told people that he was interested in hiring more women and minorities. He eventually realized that the channels along which people came to the job was already selecting for white males, and that more diverse hiring required rethinking those channels.
That has nothing to do with diversity based on appearance nor will those policies help.
Here's [1] an overview of a bunch of programs. It includes data on how they've affected employee composition and discusses why certain things fail or succeed. The first success it cites is voluntary diversity training. The sort Google has. The sort that James Damore attended and then got angry about.
As said before: remove any selection bias, then hire those who can do the work, want to do the work, and have shown to do the work well before. Then measure performance and promote using the same objective processes. That's it.
Perhaps we can boil down the issue as the difference between making hiring as fair as possible, or making hiring ensure a certain outcome. The first option is good since it produces fair results, but the latter is actually what's happening in most places.
Diversity-based policies currently are only focused on the outcome, but the outcome is not what should be designed for. The outcome should just be what it will naturally be (whether it's "diverse" or not) and we should only control for selection and opportunity. This is what diversity-based policies do not help since you cannot work backwards from the outcome, you must start with making a fair process and just let people do what they want do beyond that.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apolog...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/08/09/faceapp-spa...
https://www.rt.com/viral/400927-robots-racist-sexist-bank-lo...
http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-huawei-smartphone-bea...
https://www.bis.org/review/r160531e.pdf asks literally "Diversity of what exactly?"
The history of women in tech completely contradicts your belief. The lack of representation is a real problem, we can debate how to fix it, but to claim it doesn't exist is baseless and harmful.
https://hackernoon.com/a-brief-history-of-women-in-computing...
The issue is that it doesn't matter. Women might be less interested in tech, as in if you took 100 men and 100 women and measured their interest the men might be higher.
That doesn't mean no women are interested in tech, or that those who are interested are less competent.
I do think the idea of "less interested" is shallow and ignores every other explanation. For example, women are a majority in health care but a minority of doctors. Why?
It does matter. As technology becomes more deeply embedded into our society the assumptions made by the people that designed that technology get amplified and hardened. Have you not heard the story about the soap-dispenser that wouldn't recognize black skin? It's a minor annoyance now, but it won't be when the technology is responsible for more critical stuff.
https://mic.com/articles/124899/the-reason-this-racist-soap-...
>For example, women are a majority in health care but a minority of doctors. Why?
Becoming a doctor requires an immense amount of capital and free time. There are structural barriers that prevent women from accessing this capital and free time as easily as men can.
There is also a long history of "men are doctors, women are nurses".
[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/medical-school-gra...
Nursing is one of the best all-around careers in the US when you take all factors into account (barriers to entry, pay, potential advancement, availability of jobs in both urban and rural areas, lack of ageism, long-term stability, etc.). Certain specialist nurses like CRNAs can make $150k+. Nurse practitioners also have a higher median salary than software developers in the US according to the BLS.
It's not that shallow. Using your example, the interesting things become visible when you dig down into different types of work done in the medical profession. Scott Alexander has a very convincing piece on the whole topic:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
The issue of interest is tackled in section IV of the post. If you scroll down to the end of the section, there are interesting charts there, showing gender distribution of doctors among medical specialties. The distribution happens to align nicely with the theory of differences in interests, explored in that section.
It’s very obvious to me that the negative reaction was greatly amplified by the ever-outraged and ever-posturing social (media) justice contingent.
Two such arguments for this kind of policies:
- by giving them jobs which they wouldn't otherwise have the skills to fill you are trying to break the "cycle" (more on that below)
- having different viewpoints in a team can be beneficial beyond the skill set those people should bring according to their role (ex. for developing apps that don't just cater to the hipster young)
Another thing to consider is that the way you measure performance may be biased, resulted from decades of privileged groups having the leadership role in that domain/area and having developed it in certain ways that caters to their skill set.
For the "breaking the cycle" part, I mean that systematic discrimination results in people of certain origins simply not having the opportunity/chance to have developed the skills to be competitive with the privileged classes. And no, you can't just fix this by giving them a "chance to learn", some of the negative impacts on these groups of people are permanent and happen in early life. Obviously trying to handle this problem in the workplace is just a "hack", it's too late already but it does have the benefit that now those people get included in a social environment that they would normally be cut out from, get payed more than they would otherwise and, hopefully, this will trickle down to their children and grandchildren so in a few generations of doing this we don't actually need to be doing it anymore.
I'm not saying that all of this means I'm convinced affirmative action is doing more good than bad, just that I see it has possible benefits.
Irish immigrants started out from a culture, where the typical peasant was 1/2 to 1/4th as wealthy as the median pre-Civil War American Slave. There was a period of time when ethnic Irish political machines helped to place the party faithful into cozy government jobs. This was beneficial, up to a point. However, there is a point where such subgroup politics becomes so corrupt, the leaders of that group keep their people in deliberate isolation to maintain their power.
The IQs of many ethnic immigrant groups to the US can be shown to have increased after several generations. The Polish and Italian immigrant groups' IQs increased from 85 to over 100 over the 1st half of the 20th century. There seems to have been a reversal of such trends for African American communities starting in the 60's. There are also studies of the African American children of US armed forces personnel in Germany. Their IQs are the same as other children growing up in Germany. My conclusion is that the leadership of the African American community and the influence of the US political Left, by glorifying a toxic subset of their ethnic culture, is holding the group back, in cultural isolation, in such a way as to harm the prospects of their children as strongly as lead in the water of Flint Michigan.
I voted for Obama. However, in retrospect, he was part of the shift of the American left into an authoritarian version. Those collegiate "progressive" protesters who say, "F your free speech" are part of this unfortunate shift.
which toxic culture are they supposedly glorifying?
Urban thug culture.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
There is a genteel African American culture. I've known people from that thread of American culture. It valued learning, rationality, responsibility, and manners. Also, not all Black Americans are too crazy about Obama's legacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPXTWJhnYM
Yes, because of improved living conditions, and better food compared to the old country - not because of political leadership.
In part because of leadership -- chiefly thought leadership, a part of which came in the form of assimilation. The power of human capital -- culture -- should not be underestimated. If it's just access to resources like improved food and living conditions, then every group would progress at the same rate. If it's just access to resources, then giving people resources would automatically make them richer. However, there are a number of Africans who advocate stopping aid to Africa. Africa is full or resources, and Japan has very few. Why is Japan so much wealthier?
Most of the answer is human capital.
If the cultures of the Polish and Italians were not encouraging their younger generations to better their fortunes through education and business, then the cultures would have lowered the material wealth of the groups and held them back, in much the same way that the early Irish immigrants to the US lowered the quality of life in their slums.
In this, there is much hope. If cultural transmission can raise up the 19th century potato famine Irish to the 1st world mainstream, there is basically nothing it can't accomplish. (However, culture runs deep, below the level of the conscious mind. It can't be transmitted by simple edict.)
No offence but I think it's kind of harmful to everyone when you make arguments based on your race and gender.
But why does that make it okay? I absolutely believe that you're right in that there has been worse discrimination over the decades and that maybe old white men can find jobs elsewhere, but that doesn't make discrimination okay. It's not okay when those "old school companies" discriminate against any minorities and it's not okay when some discriminate against old white men.
Say 100% discrimination is the KKK lynching people. Say 50% discrimination is redlining and refusal to hire. Then what are white males facing? Maybe 10%? Yes, it matters. And also yes, it's not in the same league as what other groups have had to face.
How do you know that they were hired just because of their minority status?
So, no, there are no examples with evidence of people hired just for minority status in the lawsuit filing.
You might think that's not direct evidence, but it's evidence that supports the story in the paragraphs I outlined.
It says explicitly in paragraph 179: "Upon information and belief, the Google employee was not selected due to the fact that the hiring managers were looking solely for “diverse” individuals, and as a Caucasian male, the Google employee did not help fill their mandatory (and illegal) quotas."
And then "the Google employee’s former director initiated a “Diversity Team Kickoff” with the intent to freeze headcount so that teams could find diversity candidates to help fill the empty roles. Google was specifically looking for women and non-Caucasian individuals to fill these roles."
I think _you_ think that _I_ think this is damning proof and that the case is settled, and I've never claimed that. I just said that there are examples of people being hired because of their diversity status, with supporting evidence.
I'm not saying the evidence is true, or that it's directly related, but it _is_ "supporting evidence".
Yes, at 188; I addressed it. It's evidence provided for something, but not the thing you claimed.
> It says explicitly in paragraph 179: "Upon information and belief, the Google employee was not selected due to the fact that the hiring managers were looking solely for “diverse” individuals, and as a Caucasian male, the Google employee did not help fill their mandatory (and illegal) quotas."
Yes, that's an allegation. No evidence supporting this allegation is included (and, further, it used the “on information and belief” language which indicates that the party filing the lawsuit does not have first-hand knowledge that the allegation is true, but expects to have evidence—e.g., attained through discovery—to prove it should the case go to trial.)
This is perfectly normal for a lawsuit complaint, of course, but does not support your claim of examples (or even an example) with evidence in the filing.
I understand that it's not proof of it, like I said, and I understand that there's no direct evidence supporting that claim.
What I'm saying is that the email they embed there is supporting evidence of the narrative outlined in those paragraphs.
And I don't understand how you can say "no evidence supporting this allegation is included" then.
At this point, I'm not sure how to phrase myself to get my point across either - english is a second language, so please excuse me.
I'm quite certain that we are in agreement - what we probably disagree with is my distilling this down to the single sentence that I did initially.
But even that is a sentence distilled in good faith on my part, I don't feel that I misrepresented it that badly, and it's the kind of sentence I'd use around the dinner table until someone wanted to dig further into it.
Many of the media interpretations of what James Damore wrote were very biased, and effectively amounted to hit pieces. His use of terms like "Trait Neuroticism" were direct uses of psychological terms which just sound bad as everyday English. Evolutionary Biology also tends to have a "dismal" feeling to it, like Economics can.
One can't take fields like Evolutionary Biology and Economics as morally prescriptive. In that direction lies madness, clearly. However, to then take a knee-jerk ideological stance towards science and declare that everyone must be equal inside is just the West's version of Lysenkoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
As is usually the case, reality is complex, requires a nuanced understanding, and might sound depressing if you give it a pessimistic read:
Most of the pieces about the memo didn't take time to highlight that "neuroticism" and "agreeableness" refer to Big-5 personality traits, not the everyday understanding of the words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between descriptive and normative statements.
Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between statements about distribution of something within a population, and statements about all members of that population.
Basically its lexical nature introduces perceptual bias that skews any factor analysis for biological structures - i.e. behavior between genders, for example. The way Damore uses it to support his hypothesis wasn't correct.
>And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
Thanks for that. I find that reaction much more informative than the name-calling sent at James Damore.
In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.
Well, one should expect that something based on self-report surveys to be about that disconnected from underlying biology. "...lexical perception reflects some elements of it" -- where {it} == {underlying biology}
As per usual, the reality of what goes on inside us is probably more complicated than our mental model of it.
Incorrectly using evidence to support your opinion as you broadcast it at work, and not listening, discussing, or considering critical feedback (like this) is a different matter. Especially when it means incorrectly classifying your co-workers and trying to change how your work fights social biases.
Sorry, but while your observation is interesting, there is nothing incorrect about citing such evidence.
Especially when it means incorrectly classifying your co-workers and trying to change how your work fights social biases.
Exactly how did James Damore go about classifying specific co-workers? [Citation Needed] Seriously, cite James Damore and show how he "classified" anyone in particular.
> Women, on average, have more:
> - Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas...
> - Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness...
> - Neuroticism...
Damore supports this with a link [1] to a Wikipedia article, which immediately says:
> On the scales measured by the Big Five personality traits women consistently report higher Neuroticism, agreeableness, warmth (an extraversion facet)...
Damore incorrectly uses this information to make the broad statement that "Women have..." instead of "Women self-report...". This is incorrectly classifying your women coworkers as being, among other things, more neurotic than their male counterparts.
You may think, "So what?", but this is being used in an argument about how a company fights social biases, and this is incredibly relevant because lexical self-reporting is open to the same biases that are being fought. Damore, intentionally or not, glosses over this, but more importantly was not receptive to this type of feedback, hence the broadcasting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
Just because there is correlational evidence for the general population, it doesn't automatically follow that any given explictly selected population (such as Google's employee population) follows the stated correlation. Does he say so explicitly, and can you honestly rule out a speculative reading of his memo? I asked you for James Damore citing any particular coworker as having any particular quality. Still, the best you can do is to nitpick words and impute motives.
Also, what's particularly wrong with sensitive, agreeable, and warm people? I'm quite sensitive, though I'm only agreeable and warm in certain contexts. I could see how all of those traits could be of great benefit to developing many of Google's apps. Your implication that those traits are somehow bad also smacks of bias.
Given all the above, it sure seems like I could purport to read between the lines and say that you have some kind of vested interest in a particular reading of his memo, but my doing so would be falling into the very kind of irrational projection I'm self-referentially citing. So am I wrong in making this kind of projection? If I'm wrong for doing that, then it would seem you're wrong for your projections as well. If you say I'm correct about the projection, well, I'll take that just as well.
You asked for a citation from Damore's memo, and I provided it. Anything you personally feel or think about yourself is anecdotal evidence and not really relevant. If anything, how you personally feel about this new information (that you requested) can be analyzed for confirmation bias.
Considering the question is about (lack of) representation, it is very much about the women who are not coworkers.
Its interpretation as evidence for what I asked for is pretty stretched and tortured. Thanks for that!
Until the people who dislike what he had to say are willing to have an honest conversation about things he actually did say, progress here is impossible, and further backlash and resentment against minorities is inevitable.
I see their point, but there is a way of discussing it in a way that would minimize this risk. On the other hand, if you have some assumptions and consider their negation offensive, it's very difficult to have any form of conversation.
2. I think it takes more than one article (which has been cited once, by the author themselves) to unseat the Big Five.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/citedby...
3. As an aside, note that the article finds significant sex differences (p=0.00) in 10 out of 12 items on its proposed scale, STQ-150, if I'm understanding it correctly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/table/p...
2. Appealing to number of citations is an appeal to popularity (fallacy) because it avoids criticizing the content. It's also not "unseating" the big five, just demonstrating how the big five is incorrectly used as biological factor analysis. There are other applications is psychoanalysis the big five can be use for.
3. If you read the paper, you'd see that Table 3 is used in conjunction with other data to prove their hypothesis on projection-through-capacity bias.
In that case, the only proper response is to report that the word neurotic is not scientific.
I think that's a discussion worth having. That would've been a lot better than just firing the guy!
Has the Big Five model been actually debunked? Or, rather, has it received criticism.
But, yes, your focus on the content of the memo itself is a breath of fresh air in this overall debacle of a discourse.
It also saddens me that a number of Damore's suggestions to make the workplace more "nurture-trait-friendly" got overshadowed by those dubious extrapolations. It seems interesting and fruitful to me to explore the work dynamics and psychology present in more "nurture" fields and see how well they translate to software development and collaboration.
There is a silver lining to all this for me: it shows that whereas women used to have little voice in the public sphere, "American women" as a class now have a sufficiently loud voice that even its less-well-thought-out ideologies have traction and influence in civil society (along with all that entails, including having possibly self-proclaimed representatives and "thought leaders").
There is nothing good about someone who has a "sufficiently loud voice" -- if that loudness comes not from principle and merit, but from emotional toxicity.
After awhile, onlookers catch onto the fact one is spending all of their time moving the goalposts.
Short people, ugly people, fat people, disabled people... The list of discriminated against populations is practically endless and you can’t let it tear you up or drive you crazy if you’re one of them.
Why is it important that they have a sufficiently loud voice "as a class?" This seems backwards to me. The whole point of liberation is liberation to be treated as an individual not as a member of a class based on something contextually irrelevant like your biological sex.
Empowering the individual is a noble goal, but that is a separate battle with a different front.
I think it's made to seem that way by media coverage and political propaganda(especially from the left) more than it actually is. The problem is that it's easy to analyze something by arbitrary groups but in doing so often if not usually miss things (indeed this was one of Damore's key themes in his original essay).
The rhetoric may be actualizing, but I still think it's more a case of bad analytical generalizations than actual decision-making. Although, it's getting worse, as the whole drama with Jordan Peterson last year over pronouns demonstrated. At the core of his concern seemed to be he growing number of increasingly narrow and increasingly arbitrary suspect class definitions (or whatever they call it in Canada).
The original concept of a suspect class in the US was codified to serve as a legal guidelines for determining whether discrimination had taken place. The idea was to balance the ideal of democratic freedom to enact laws with the political reality that some clearly identified recognized groups (mainly Black Americans) had not been allowed to participate in the democratic process that produced the laws under which they had to conform. Many of those laws were shown to be prima facie discriminatory and evidence suggested plenty more were intended to be discriminatory in practice. And by virtue of minority status, they'd be unable to effectively challenge those discriminatory laws through democratic means. Women classified as a quasi-suspect class by virtue of historical disenfranchisement, despite their not being a minority.
But, it has been at least century since women were granted the right to vote. "Women as a class" have been one of the strongest political factions in the United States for decades. Roe v. Wade was 1973, a decade before any Millenial was even born. Pandering to women is pervasive in US politics on both sides.
The narrative that women had no voice, political will, or influence until Last Thursday is persistent and massive historical revisionism.
My guess is that he will be settled with to avoid the annoyance or simply destroyed in court.
Many media outlets aggressively attacked his memo, but the argument isn't "his arguments are validated because outlets attacked his memo"; it's that the response to his memo was malicious and slanderous, and this is wrong even if his arguments are bad. Bad arguments should be met with good arguments, not hate and slander.
More recent studies don't show any bias against women in callback rates. In fact, some show slight bias for women (and if you're willing to look at non peer reviewed sources, more than a slight: https://talent.works/blog/2018/01/08/the-science-of-the-job-...)
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview."
"Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
Why would it matter that you are "a mixed race woman in tech"? Your comment should be judged only by its content, not by its author's race or gender, right?
Preemptive comments of this type, which reflect the posters hostile prejudgement of the likely responses, are IMO, contrary to the letter and spirit of the HN guidelines including the rule of presumption of good faith, frequently (as in this case) involve preemptive violations of the guideline against commenting on downvotes, and contribute to a hostile atmosphere rather than productive debate.
If you are going to post something, with or without a disclaimer about your own background, do so without commenting about how you expect people to react in comments or votes. If there are responses you take issue with, take issue with them when they exist.
I don't think anyone believes in the opposite, that biological difference in gender plays exactly zero part in lack of interest in tech from women. The memo was suggesting this could play a part, but not whether if biological differences are significant or even meaningful.
To the best of my knowledge, we can't disentangle biological from cultural biases across gender. Hunting down biological reasons isn't productive and threatens gender equality initiatives, hence the massive backlash.
Should we question the ideals of gender equality in the workplace? That's probably the discussion the memo wanted to inspire, but it only led to out cries of "sheeple better wake up" and "hell no."
That's just it; it really did not. It contained a lot of things that people who aren't members of those groups he targeted think are plausible.
"I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. "
And what, specifically, would those differences be?
The balance of the evidence, is that there are some biological differences in preferences. Both biological and cultural factors are at play. As groups, women and men are about the same in terms of average IQ, however, men tend to have a higher population of the extreme outliers. (Both extremely smart men and extremely stupid men.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
Since the human brain and its interaction with culture is very complicated, more research is needed. But a fair reading of what we have so far would seem to indicate: it's both.
Beware of ideological just-so stories that make you feel good. Also, if it sounds messy and complicated, it sounds like actual biology and psychology.
There are some great weasel words like: "there is good evidence ... play a role ..."
Without a hypothetical mechanism, this is all quite speculative.
"Abstract
Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes."
I don't understand how your criticism "indirect correlational evidence" applies to this study, could you maybe elaborate on how you would improve this study?
I would like to point out that saying this changes are due to evolution not sex is unvalid because then nothing will be due to sex, not saying that you think that but just getting it out of the way.
> [Plenty]
> It looks like there is only indirect evidence,
And there go the goalposts, red-shifting into the sunset.
> "correlation means causation" / "there is good evidence ... play a role ..."
Well, remember that Damore's claim was that there is evidence that we cannot categorically rule out biological causes for the skewed representation, in addition to discrimination.
For that claim, even much weaker evidence than what exists would have been sufficient.
"We cannot rule out biological causes" and "We should base our HR policy on this speculative research".
There, fixed that for you.
Also, the research is not at all speculative, quite the opposite. It is immeasurably more solid than the blind assertion that unequal representation is caused entirely/solely by oppression/discrimination etc., for which there is very little evidence overall, and virtually none that holds up to any sort of scrutiny.
Background: there is little to no evidence for the assertion that discrimination/oppression is the sole cause of the under-representation of women in tech, but that assertion is the basis of the HR policies that Damore criticized. In fact, the evidence that it is even a contributing factor is at best scant/anecdotal.
The evidence that Damore cited is incomparably more solid.
No, while that was a supporting claim, the conclusory claims everything in the manifesto are offered to support are that specific policy changes are justified.
> Also, he did not reject Google's core values, unless you take a biased and imputational reading.
As an example, empathy is a core publicly-stated internal value of Google which Damore explicitly called for de-emphasizing. There's nothing “biased and imputational” about reading Damore’s words to mean what they explicitly say.
No. The main reason he gives for policy changes is that the policy isn't working. Numbers haven't budged, despite measures getting ever more extreme and likely illegal. He then suggests that maybe, just maybe, the policy is based on a false assumption. And then delivers some evidence that this could be true. And then presents some ideas of what policies might have a better chance of working.
> empathy is a core publicly-stated internal value of Google which Damore explicitly called for de-emphasizing
Where? I've searched a bunch of places and can't find this, for example:
https://www.google.com/about/philosophy.html
I also googled "google values" and none of the posts so far have had "empathy" in them, though it could be that I haven't searched enough. Anyway, empathy is not a value. Empathy is an emotional capacity. His criticism of empathy is, as far as I can tell, based on the thesis of Paul Bloom's recent book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. [1][2][3].
"Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make."
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29100194-against-empathy
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/books/review-against-empa...
b - higher capacity of empathy might be in part to biological: "Testosterone may reduce empathy by reducing brain connectivity" http://www.psypost.org/2016/03/testosterone-may-reduce-empat...
c- people who have a higher level of empathy might be interrested in fields which need a higher level of empathy, or seek to join fields that directly interact with people [ I don't have a source for this one. It seems logical to me, but it is unproven. if you know a study that proves or disproves it. Please link it]
d - higher levels of women interessted in other fields leads to less women interrested in tech
Its not that way for white guys to receive hundreds of Nos?
Of course. They'd get fired.
Then there must be a biological difference between women from different cultures that's also contributing, because I've only observed this "lack of interest" in Anglosphere women.
From my experience, for instance, Indian women have no such problem and are in fact strongly represented within the IT profession and I've worked alongside several of them. Women in my country of birth (Greece) have no such problem and about two fifths of the Greek programmers I know are women. In the British universities I studied and the British workplaces I worked in the last few years, on the other hand, women are about a tenth of all programmers I've met.
So because it's a bit absurd for Anglo women to be so specifically genetically programmed to stay out of the IT professions, I'm going to assume it's not a genetic, but a cultural thing going on.
Btw, I've discussed this with a female Indian software engineer I was working with and she explained that in India, working in IT is seen as an office job and so more suited to women. Traditional gender roles, innit.
Now this doesn't mean women are incapable or bad at copmuter engineering or anything in IT. Quite the opposite, women are just as capable and can be just as good in IT as men, there is no reason they can't.
If what you say is true and indian culture views IT as an office job and therefore a woman's job, then I don't see how that contradicts the assertion that there are biological cognitive differences, women can do the same job, they are just less inclined to be interested in it. On average.
So while gender roles may play a role (pun intended) in the distribution of gender in the IT job, expecting a 50/50 representation is entirely fictional, there will be a bias towards one or the other based on simple cognitive development tendencies.
---
0: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00429-017-1600-2
1: doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.10.011.
That maybe one of the saddest statements in the history of modern discourse. It’s not your fault for saying it, it’s that you needed to say it.
We have reached the point where identity matters more than content. This is the exact opposite of the MLK dream as I understood it.
(it's secondary, but FWIW, I'd debate that the Damore memo contained a lot of truth: yes it contained some truth, but it contained more/deeper falsehoods and wrong conclusions, IMO. So it's a bit unproductive to focus on the "truth" part. OTOH it's horrifically unproductive and wrong to fire someone for expressing a misguided, but not inherently evil/malicious p.o.v.)
So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organizations, trying to sue Google and retire off the proceeds, or leaving tech and becoming a noname blue collar or a freelancer forever hiding his face.
I hope they will settle for an amount sufficient for retirement and the dude's life won't get ruined due to a stupid political game he didn't even realize he was playing.
Isn't that what he's been doing through his twitter account where he muses whether people join the KKK because they have cool titles? Or his interviews with people like Milo?
That was just a joke, stop pretending he is a neo-nazi.
"The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor - I am a racist making fun of stereotype of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.
"This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that's neither here nor there."
I admit that he's almost certainly not playing by the alt-right's playbook - but he should be smart enough to realize that he's playing into the alt-right's playbook, and if he's not that smart, he doesn't have any business getting a job at Google or Microsoft. There are absolutely ways to express the points he's trying to make without letting yourself be turned into an alt-right poster-boy (and they're also more effective at convincing his ostensible target audience, namely senior decision-makers in large tech companies).
So basically your whole argument is that no one is allowed to joke because that's what nazis are doing?
Let me quote his whole tweet:
>The KKK is horrible and I don't support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. "Grand Wizard"?
There are no shades of gray. This joke isn't even remotely offensive. The only reason why anyone could think otherwise is their prejudice against Damore.
No, that is not my argument. This is about the second time in one week where I've posted "x was a bad idea in context", and someone else has replied with "So, your argument is no one should be allowed to do x ever?", so clearly I am being very bad at communicating. As with last time, I'll try to explain my position in a little more detail in the hope that it will help.
My position is that, if you are already at risk of being an alt-right poster-boy (thanks to having been forced to do interviews with alt-right YouTubers because nobody else would interview you fairly, or something), and if you are not actually a supporter of the alt-right position, it is probably a good idea to avoid doing and saying things that give the further impression that you are and want to be an alt-right poster boy. (If you do want to be a supporter of the alt-right position, by all means, more power to you, but then arguments about joking are moot - you're an intentional and happy member of the alt-right and we can continue discussions having established that. But for now I'm assuming that's not the case.)
This is a different position from "Don't tell jokes," or "Don't tell jokes about the KKK," or even "Don't tell jokes that make it sound like you support the KKK," or even "Don't make non-joking commentary that supports certain things the KKK is doing."
A brief aside there - I don't understand how that tweet is a joke. I think it's meant earnestly, and I think it stands up as a piece of earnest commentary and I think it does him and his position a disservice to read it as a joke. The internal title names are cool. That's why they picked them. The KKK wanted, and still wants, to attract membership, and cool-sounding titles are something that pushes people from neutral to excited. This isn't a particularly novel observation, but it's certainly a true one. (And the KKK isn't alone; plenty of secret societies of varying levels of racism have done similar things through history.) The job of smart, non-KKK-sympathizing people is to recognize that this is a tactic, and to go find some other less racist outlet for your desire to be called "Grand Wizard," like tabletop gaming, instead of expressing approval for the KKK's marketing tactics.
This is also a different position from "That joke is offensive." I did not claim that the joke was offensive, nor did anyone else, and I think "Actually, that's not offensive and you're wrong because you were offended" is a terribly fallacious rhetorical strategy when nobody has claimed to be offended.
Did they? Can you provide any evidence that the Nazi party used "jokes" to hide their beliefs? I can't quite see that, somehow. To the contrary, they were quite open about their beliefs.
Is this just an attempt to extend his relevance a bit longer?
He’s basically trying to get a new protected class created to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
Whatever you think of him it seems like a REALLY big hurdle.
And that’s assuming no ‘mandatory binding arbitration’ issues from his work contract.
Even if he wins this could take a very long time (and trips up and down the levels of courts).
No, he's not; none of race or sex discrimination (both under federal and state law), nor political coercion (under California state law) are new protections.
> to protect actions that clearly constituted creating a hostile work space based on long established precedent.
That would be a problem in a direct action suit over his firing, but what he has actually filed is a class action alleging a pattern and policy of discrimination on three different prohibited bases. While there are challenges in doing that, they are different than the challenges in a direct action.
I think his only hope is persecution for his ‘belief’, which isn’t a religion and this would be a new protection (IANAL, unsurprisingly).
I didn’t see the class action bit. I wonder if he can even find enough people to join him to be certified as a class.
He has a giant ‘don’t hire me’ target on him now (weather you think just or not)... will people want to throw their lot in with him and risk the same label?
As long as Damore doesn't publicly stomp on any critical bit of right-wing orthodoxy I'm sure he'll land safely in right-wing media, regardless of the outcome of any legal cases he's involved in.
You make mistakes in an industry and you own the impacts to your reputation. He has done serious harm to the work of so many by his actions and absolutely deserves to own the consequences.
And let's be serious here he has zero chance of winning against Google.
Initial filing for a court case is crucial for establishing what we're actually sueing over, and this will be an interesting one, because the chances of his legal team winning this one are definitely non-zero.
I am not a lawyer but that, while trivial, might be enough for a court to rule against Google.
It's why I think this google will settle with Damore for a very high amount, because discovery will not be good for them.
Don't be so sure of that. Federal law prohibits firing an employee who is trying to improve working conditions. And that's what he is claiming he was doing with his memo.
And there are a number female SJW Google employees who have made really vicious, public, anti-male statements and no one batted an eyelash. So I think his claim of gender-based discrimination is quite supportable.
At the very least he should have learned how important soft skills are and that his idea of what makes a good engineer was woefully incomplete.
If he hasn't learned anything, then why would anybody hire the guy?
"Mistakes were made, and I want to move on with my life....", no details -- just pandering. He won't necessarily be dishonest if he limits the context of the apology.
(I don't think one should apologize for opinions and ideas that go un-enacted. Knee-jerk reactions to opinions you don't like tend to blow them up, and that's why James Damore is a name we recognize now. Isn't that opposite to everyone's intention of minimizing his point of view? Ironic.)
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
I do get your point though.
I've never made a fuckup of nearly the same magnitude, but the times I made a mistake in public apologizing always made things worse.
An individual can be reasoned with, placated. You can make reparations, promises that the other person will believe because of a precedent of mutual trust and forgiveness.
However, you can't do that with an angry mob.
Apologizing only convinces the people who are called for his head that they were correct. Usually it will lead to further sanctions.
Edit: I feel some might be reading this wrong. I'm did not say it works 100% of the time. I said that I'm 100% certain it has worked because it's worked for me.
After some more searching, I remembered the blowup over a "big dongles" joke at PyCon in 2013. I found the name of one of the men involved. I don't want to name him here, but it looks like he's still gainfully employed in tech, using Python.
I agree that social media outrage can be overblown and vicious. I don't want to minimize that. But it fades[1]. "Crucified for life" seems inaccurate.
[1] Even justified outrage fades; did #kony2012 even trend through the end of 2012? But the viciousness while every angry person knows your name can be astonishing. That's why I use a nym here and on Ars Technica that has no direct links to my professional or IRL identities, and why I usually skip commenting or reading about the outrage du jour. I must be feeling lucky today to write even this much.
Some of the activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser
Never heard of this. This is unbelievably unethical.
Or create "Not James Damore Consulting, Inc." and hire himself out through that.
"Ruined?" Because he might have to take a non-tech job? Please.
He went to a diversity training event which should've given him a clear idea of Google's stance on the issue. Then he published an internal memo arguing against that stance. He knew the game he was playing. He just played it poorly.
Regardless, he'll be fine.
If the company doesn't want views that might contradict current policy, it should not solicit feedback.
There are more tech jobs than those at Google, Facebook, etc.
If anything Google will settle because the proof of misrepresentation is in James's favor.
Sure there are lots of things you could and Google could have argued. But they chose to respond to what had to be either a different paper or their emotions.
EDIT: Also reminder some googlers kept politically motivated blacklists, if those blacklists were on company computers, Google will be hammered for it. Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways.
https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/google-manifesto-blacklists.h...
This is probably a discussion where painting with a broad brush muddies the waters. Specifically because we're talking about distinctions between individuals within the group you're calling "conservatives".
Also, I get the impression that you're conflating conservatives and populists on this issue. Is that intentional? Because populism and conservatism seem pretty orthogonal to me.
or do you mean google settles? maybe. I kind of wish they would just let their lawyers run wild with this though.
Since they were G+ blocklists, they were obviously on company computers. OTOH, it's not clear (despite the lawsuits characterization, which is pretty directly contradicted by the posts and emails offered to support it) that these were motivated by ideology rather than disruptive manner of expressing that in the workplace. Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
> Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways
Which is why there won't be a settlement; it's clearly a politically motivated suit aimed to hurt Google as badly as possible; if Damore and the other individually named plaintiff were seeking to maximize the probability and magnitude of personal recompense, this would be a direct action. A settlement with no admission of guilt, no discovery, and just a go-away cash payment that’ll mostly be assigned to the attorneys won't achieve the goals for which they are filing the suit.
Nope. Think about that. You think a guy who got fired after a few years of work experience would rather make a company look bad than gain financial security?
The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused. You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is. That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened. Months of negotiation did not go anywhere.
That's my theory anyway. I have no knowledge of this case, but I have seen this happen many times.
No, I think Damore is savvy enough to be aware of (and, given his participation in right-wing media after the memo blew up, whether or not this was in his mind in advance, has likely since been counseled by others even more aware of) the fact that his route to maximizing financial returns from this affair lie in maximizing the media impact and his centrality to it, not maximizing the lawsuit payout.
> The reason we are hearing about the lawsuit is because he did try for a settlement, with terms much like you deacribe, and Google refused.
Pure speculation, both as to whether he attempted at settlement and what the terms he requested were if he did.
> You only go to court as a last resort, and that's what this is
That's obviously not a universal truth.
> That's also why we are only hearing about it now instead of when it happened
Damore filed an NLRB complaint almost simultaneously with his firing (it was subsequently withdrawn) and immediately started his intent to file a lawsuit; we know from the details of the law suit and the Damore camps own description that they spent the intervening time gathering stories to support a class action. You are spinning a fantasy out of speculation.
We are both speculating, that's all.
Given how a lot of the other provided examples were claims of supporting Trump being blatant asshattery, I don't think they necessarily do contradict it.
Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.
Some of the examples have managers acknowledging that being on the lists makes work more difficult and interferes with promotions / transfers. And saying that well, if that bothers you then you shouldn't support [things that Trump supporters are accused of supporting].
Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn't engage with left wingers and maybe he was indeed just appealing to the right.
[1] I don't want to use "right wing" in a disparaging way. I think classical liberalism is perhaps right of center today. I think some of the right wing narratives make sense, but with big caveats. The far right is just a slip away, though. And they would hunt people like me down...
Edit: I don't mean right wing in a disparaging way. I enjoy Joe Rogan (his interviews with NDT and Lawrence Krause are a lot of fun), Dave Rubin (his interview with Faisal is fantastic) and Jordan Peterson. But they are clearly classical liberal, which is arguably right of center today.
Maybe I was extreme in saying far right is just a slip away. I think similar things can happen on the left too of course. Let just not go to the "far-*"...
And to make sure that people know: He's a liar. Even if you ignore him intentionally misrepresenting his PhD status, he boldly lied about his FIDE chess master status.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/02/26/jo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k
You should listen to his episode with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, they talk about the mindset of denialism quite a bit.
But this has been a big topic of debate on his podcast subreddit as well. I think it mainly comes from the guests he has on, but Joe has written on Twitter about how getting left leaning guests on to talk politics is just a lot harder. Russell Brand is great and all, but no one else really seems interested for whatever reason.
Which ones did he ask to speak on?
He is if anything fairly moderate with a slight libertarian streak, especially when it comes to drugs.
I don't agree with lots of his positions and he's definitely not some really smart guru, but I like that he's an average guy with an open mind who lets speakers of all viewpoints express themselves in a very welcoming way. I mean hosting Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein, both on the 2 ends of the political spectrum and making it a very intellectually stimulating dialogue is a breath of fresh air in today's gotcha media. You know CNN and fox have an agenda when they bring opposing viewpoints on their show, trying to invalidate their ideas. In joe rogan's podcasts that never seems to be the case, instead discussion leads to more moderate viewpoints rather than debates and winners. Only really see that on PBS lately.
That said, I do find many of his guests abhorant and just skip a fair bit of his podcasts.
Even what I just said, that he isn't, you should go look up, investigate, and see what YOU think.
Have you watched any of his right wing outlet interviews? Literally on every interview he mentions "Nobody from left reached out to me, only the right wing outlets reached out to me". I'd definitely recommend watching his Dave Rubin interview (even though you think he is a right winger).
If you were him, you'd rather go out and present your side, than to be portrayed in whichever smear light the media wants to portray you.
There are people who lost the narrative from both left and right (like Milo) and that is definitely worse than losing the support for only one side.
Also, hypothetically it sounds great that you show up to both sides on a divided issue like this, but that isn't possible anymore in the polarized society we live in (a great example of this is you classifying Dave Rubin as 'right wing', just see how many people are calling you out on it).
This is the danger of progressive supremacy and the only way out of this hell-hole is encouraging true diversity and inclusiveness -- diversity of thought that includes right-wing conservative viewpoints in addition to those of the left.
The left has intolerant people as well. "No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."
However, somehow they aren't running the party like they are on the right.
This is nonsensical. Tolerance is the region between what you like and what you fight. There are lots of obviously bad things you shouldn't tolerate (like murder), and lots of mildly distasteful things you should.
Someone else being less tolerant of something than we think they should be isn't some special category of evil. As with anything else, you have to decide whether a particular case is bad enough that you must fight it, or ambiguous enough that it isn't worth the conflict.
The intolerant left seems to have Berkeley buttoned up.
I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing him while not taking sides, it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace as well as how to treat other people.
These are the things that I came away with after watching it, to the best of my recollection: - Cenks inability to be charitable towards his guest - Cenks inability to let his guest make a point without challenging it repeatedly, and please note the that the word "repeatedly" is key - Cenks way of deflecting analysis of an apple by saying "but what about this orange?!" - Sams amazing patience and calm
Anyway, that's how I remember feeling after having watched it years ago. And I've never watched Cenk before or after that interview, so I have no other points of reference for his character or abilities as an interviewer.
I'm not going to go watch it again, so there's nothing to discuss here - it just amazes me that anyone would want to be interviewed by Cenk, considering how negatively I viewed his interaction with Sam.
So, I guess I should not have engaged you at all, because I have nothing to discuss, and no factual arguments to make.
I would delete my first comment if I could, but I can't.
and actually yes, do some prep work and go on a show that will be hostile. Not crazy, but potentially hostile. Someone who will reject the ideas and force you to defend and/or clarify them.
Classical liberal just seems like yet another rebranding by people who don't want to just call themselves conservatives. I've yet to hear a "classical liberal" who doesn't seem like yet another libertarian/conservative.
Anyway, what's the definition of classical liberal, conservative? It's a mishmash of random "single issues" thrown together.
The definition changes as it's convenient for the optimization game of politics, as parties, groups, power structures try to maintain their relevance, try to get more voters, more support, more donations, more allies, and so on.
No internal consistency, no moral foundations, no logic, no principles.
Pretty much all of the mainstream “right” and “left” in America are takes on classical liberalism, with different ideas about concrete context applies. The far-right and far-left (including the alt-right as part of the far-right, for this purpose) aren't.
I mean, if you want to debate, I'm happy to do so, but I'd prefer the debate be rooted in reality and not hyperbole.
On net, do you think Rogan's political commentary favors the status quo or a more equal society?
Imagine you think fire trucks are an eyesore, so you start an advocacy campaign trying to ban them from the road. Someone might accuse you of not caring if people's houses burn down.
You might reply that deep in your heart you are 100% against houses burning down and you're just weighing in on the way fires should be fought.
And maybe you're being honest that in your heart of hearts you don't want houses to burn down. But that's only relevant to you. From everyone else's perspective, your politics are pro-houses-burning-down.
Your entire first post.
1) He doesnt "spend a lot of time railing on SJWs".
2) He absolutely talks, with almost every single guest, about how to potentially change the world for the better.
3) I never indicated that I thought he wasn't right wing because of how he felt about legal pot, yet, you throw that in there anyway, i guess to belittle an argument I never made? Fun...
So yeah, two sentences and every single point is either incorrect or not useful. That's not exactly how one starts a useful debate.
Also wow that is an atrocious analogy.
I said that he was a bit disingenous about some thing and then said that he "lacked understanding about...", yet, sure, cut that off, rip out the context in the interest of being snarky to a complete stranger. Why not?
It's like the people on the right saying Edward Snowden is obviously a traitor/spy because he went to Russia. Uhhh... something very obvious is being ignored there.
Also, come on ... Joe Rogan is definitely not right-wing. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin do not self-identify as right-wing. And your [1] just seems a little extreme. "The far right is just a slip away from the reasonable right, therefore the reasonable right is dangerous?" But you don't apply that same idea to the left? Why not?
The real pattern here is that he went to the shows that would have him as a guest for reasonable discussion.
Adding to this; we should bear in mind that while nobody specific speaks for "the left"'s moral judgments, at least some people literally won't allow him to speak.
Secondly, he was never trying to be a martyr and we shouldn't expect him to be one. He was posting a controversial opinion on a message board marked for controversial opinion. He was clearly putting in a solid attempt to be objective and to employ facts and evidence. He has some academic exposure to the fields he was talking about.
He didn't expect to be targeted the way he was; he likely wasn't trying to set himself up as a hero of free speech; and he doesn't have to do a walk of shame through hostile talk shows to justify his intentions if he doesn't feel like taking the (unjustified) heat.
I don't know what he expected, but that was stupid.
Why also nobody is going to hire him.
Damore himself said he wanted to go on friendly media to do interviews, not that other media wouldn't have him.
I'm pretty sure this is textbook slippery slope fallacy
I read the memo. If one is familiar with the research and evolutionary biology, there is nothing in there to react that strongly against, unless one takes a biased, insincere reading of what he actually wrote.
him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like
Those were the only people who would talk to him without trying to make it a hit piece, same as Bret Weinstein.
Stefan Molyneux,
Not sure what Mr. Molyneux is, but given his Libertarian bent, he really doesn't fall in with the mainstream North American right. I'm really skeezed out by his past calls to his audience for "de-fooing" which reads like a cult leader asking his followers to isolate themselves from society and listen only to him.
Jordan Peterson
Terms himself a classical liberal, but also terms himself a conservative, which isn't contradictory. He's been kinda "adopted" by a northern Native American tribe. People who try to paint him as "Alt-Right" aren't actually listening to what he's saying, and are effectively in an evidence-free cloudcuckooland. (He isn't anti-trans. Rather, he's against some nefarious anti-science and compelled speech tactics employed by activists who claim to speak for all trans people. He has received numerous letters from trans people in support of his message.) I have yet to see genuine criticism of him which stands up to scrutiny.
Mike cernovich
Don't like this guy, or his politics. Why do you lump this guy and Molyneux in with people like Jordan Peterson? Doesn't make any sense to me, except as a poison pill.
Joe Rogan
Would have passed perfectly fine as a liberal in the 90's. I think the far left doesn't like him simply because he won't play along with their politics. I find him refreshingly honest and highly intelligent. (Yes, he was a moon hoaxer at one point, but unlike a lot of stupid people, he had the wherewithal to listen to arguments and change his mind.)
Dave Rubin
Terms himself a liberal, also a "classical liberal." He's made a turn towards Libertarianism. He strikes me as sincere in wanting to give everyone a chance to be heard. I think he has intellectual integrity, and as such, he's willing to change his mind. His sincerity and intellectual integrity are the best things he has going for him, though I judge him to be just at a layperson's level intellectually.
Steven Crowder
I don't think Mr. Crowder is as funny or as smart as he thinks. I think he falls down a bit in terms of his intellectual honesty and in his scholarship. (Or course, he uses the "comedian" card to get out of that.) I think his effort to expose Antifa was creditable, but I wish he did a better job of having substance. All of these topical comedians are 10X funnier when they have substance. Colbert used to be funny, and it's because he had that.
etc. is suspicious. [1]
Given that you grouped all these people together, I find your list very suspicious.
I don't believe Peterson is alt-right, but I do think there's a fair case for dismissing him as a source for anything but his specific field of clinical psychology. His sudden rise to the position of "public intellectual” (on the back of his alarmist and widely disputed take on Bill C-16 [1]) is troubling when his unwavering single-minded crusade against what he considers a global cabal of “postmodern neo-Marxists” colours nearly every view he has [2][3].
Examples of this can be seen in his bold proclamations against feminists, Disney films, the concept of white privilege, but also in his occasional habit of linking to junk-science blogs to inform his position rather than peer-reviewed research (such as when he propagated the debunked[4] claim that contrary to what nearly every climatologist, atmospheric physicist, geologist, glaciologist and oceanographer has been telling us, Earth's climate sensitivity is actually trending towards zero [5]).
He’s also demonstrably not one to allow gaps in his knowledge to get in the way of proudly displaying his confirmation biases [6][7].
So as a trained clinical psychologist, I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about when he stays in his own lane, but for an academic and supposed advocate for scientific rigour he seems remarkably lax in applying the same care and scrutiny to his positions on social issues.
1. http://sds.utoronto.ca/blog/bill-c-16-no-its-not-about-crimi...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
3. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/79568716336716185...
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFDnxMp0Hw8
5. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/92041514135884595...
6. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95073630669433651...
7. https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/95077370882567372...
He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake! In an internal corporate communication about how to better deal with diversity. The mind boggles.
>Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
Hard to do not roll my eyes when reading this. Even though I feel that there is a fringe a the feminist movement for which being a white male is a crime, this is just a fringe and I don't think it has anything to do with socialism other than these are 2 things that Damore hates.
- there are parts like this quote that made me go in one second from 'this is reasonable' to 'ok I see why he got fired'
- some parts are just stupid .. even though neuroticism is the right term and is not negative, it is had deep negative connotations for many people (not to mention that the big 5 is not exactly an uncontroversial model). Just don't use these words when arguing about a sensitive topic.
And yeah, there is a fringe of the feminist movement. Like all fringes, it is the loudest part of the movement. I think it is toxic to feminism (although that's just a feeling, hard to quantify the influence of such a fringe). I just try to ignore it, I don't really know how to argue with extremists tbh.
If he had, internet armchair scientists would be ridiculing him for being so uninformed about the topic that he didn't know the proper terminology.
This is, of course, a standard right-wing talking point about modern gender/race/etc. equality movements.
It's about as accurate as calling neoconservatism a Communist conspiracy because some notable early figures were anti-Stalinist ex-Trotskyites.
Some of these aren't like the others.
Of the ones that did, it was heavily edited to present a certain bad narrative of him.
Let's say you're a shy/introverted engineer working at Google. You are going to a bunch of diversity events because it's an easy way to progress in your career. You find things you disagree with, or think are potentially illegal, but overall agree with the end goal: more women / PoC at Google, and so put forward an analysis that supports the same goal, even asserting that diversity is a good thing, but indicating that Google's methodology is problematic, and possibly illegal. You shop it around, including to HR, who rejects it, get lots of constructive criticism and feedback from peers, revise it, and continue hoping you eventually do cause a good change in your organization.
Someone then sees it, gets angry, and proceeds to leak it to the press. A few days later, nearly every mainstream news organization has an article calling you a woman-hating sexist, calling your memo a "screed" and treating you like some kind of Nazi. Peers you've never spoken to start sending you threatening and hateful messages, not having even read your work, instead relying on clearly defamatory claims made by "news" organizations, totally misquoting what you've said, and even putting words in your mouth. Then you're fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" when you've explicitly drawn a line in your work between societal expectations on gender expression and biological predisposition due to sex, that is, you're fired for something you didn't actually say or do, and it's final, there's no appeal.
You're this young guy here, with such negative publicity, and stuck in a part of the country that's 90% leftist or left-leaning, being called all sorts of horrible things by thousands of people you don't even know. You check Twitter and see your name is associated with some of the most hateful words you could imagine.
Now, in this situation, do you respond to CNN who has just printed their 17th hitpiece on you, and hope they'll be fair to you, because you're not assertive enough to deal with the confrontation required if they start putting words in your mouth or asking leading questions? Or do you seek to tell your side of the story from people who are already presenting the story in a more neutral way?
As a European, I find all these things very absurd. Like the guys with the "dongle" joke that both got fired [1], and if I remember correctly, so did the woman reporting them.
Maybe you should all start by treating each other with more respect, whoever it is. And don't go witch-hunting.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.
Boy, and don't even begin to mention that refugee programmes in Europe are probably the least effective way to evacuate people from a warzone (and that the majority of people coming in are likely not in fact refugees).
So according to this government, that majority of people coming in are not refugees, or at least not refugees that qualify for asylum. The majority of people that get to legally stay is however refugees. Naturally people from both side of the political spectrum disagree with how the government assess applications, and it should be noted that party in power is currently the social democratic party.
Sometimes old cultural artifacts go away in the "mother country" but persist in "the colonies." Seems like the witch-hunting mentality is something that's stuck around in the US, infecting both the political Right and Left.
Or maybe you mean to say that in Europe all men are so sensible that nobody cracks dongle jokes in presence of female coworkers?
Or maybe that majority of the European women would not complain to the HR if someone did crack that joke because they are not stuck up?
Because lemme just make it clear, they didn't get fired for the dongle jokes, they got fired for the shitstorm which arose because of their jokes and how people on twitter were rallying to fire those guys.
Also, the woman who caused the shitstorm was also fired from her company due to the counter shitstorm which ensued.
Maybe you mean to say that in Europe, a company wouldn't fire someone if a shitstorm is created due to an employee's juvenile actions, because I am pretty sure that it is incorrect too.
And yes, we have no trouble saying "fucking" without censoring it. And if there is a "nipple slip" on live TV, we don't make such a big deal out of it. It's a fucking nipple, get over it.
So to answer your question: 1. We see no problem in dongle jokes 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem) 3. If those complains would go public, we would treat that person as "Ah, some idiot has a problem with such a simple joke, weird." 4. But if somehow, there would be a public shitstorm where everybody seems to be losing their mind, the company would not fire an employee over a fucking dongle joke, get serious.
So how such a thing can escalate like that, is beyond any of our (European) comprehension.
If you reread my explanation above, you will see I make no difference between different groups of people. That might already give you a clue of what is going wrong.
And if you would treat each other with more equal respect (men, woman, blacks, whites, ...), maybe you wouldn't be so uptight when someone makes a simple joke.
Who is 'we' here? You think most Americans have a problem with dongle jokes? Or you mean to say that most or all Europeans don't have a problem with dongle jokes.
> 2. If someone would see a problem with it and complain, those complains would be ignored (because we see no problem)
This is when you end up with Uber, where these complaints were ignored and they eventually ended up with Susan Fowler incident.
The company fired the woman who complained because their servers were getting DDoSed.
Look I know what you're saying, it isn't that a day passes by when someone on the Internet, Europeans don't remind Americans (And many Americans remind themselves) that Americans are very prude compared to Europe.
But what you're not doing is understanding the problem here. The problem isn't the 'prude American culture', rather, there is a civil life culture, and then there is a work culture. The complaint feminists have made is that work culture needs to be more welcoming to women.
So the question is 'What constitutes as welcoming work culture?'.
Saying "Hurr hurr, we are Europeans, we don't have problems like that" is just sidestepping the issue.
Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be? If not, then how are you dealing with it?
Sorry, but Susan Fowler did not complain about 'dongle' jokes, this was a serious case of sexual harassment. Not seeing the distinction between the two is a serious problem.
> Are European workplaces completely welcoming to women, as European feminists would like it to be?
From my personal experience, the women I worked with were a minority in tech, and they actually enjoyed working in a male dominated environment. They told me guys are more up front, and they preferred that over working in woman dominated environments where there is a lot of backstabbing going on. I worked for a lot of female managers, and they were very good at their job. Probably because women are socially softer than men (=men have more ego).
That's what I mean with respect. We will treat women as co-workers, not as people to have potentially sex with, and not with 'oh my god, there's a woman in the workplace, let's act totally different than we normally do not to scare her away'.
If he didn't know exactly what he was doing he deserves whatever happens to him for being so oblivious to the world around him.
Autism does not cause you to be a bigot.
As a fellow member of the spectrum, I can fully see where Damore fits on it. In some ways I agree with his actual points (not what the media has claimed they are), but his presentation was poor, and insensitive to how it would be received. And a good chunk of his memo was just... not good. He never intended it to be public, and it certainly wasn't fit to be (I believe he considered it a work in progress, and was looking for constructive feedback), but someone angry at him decided to make him a public figure overnight by leaking it and ruined his career.
He obviously made some very poor choices on who to associate with afterwards, not realizing the political implications that came with them. He failed to see how free publicity provided by certain parties would associate him with them.
Is there really anything he can say or do that will redeem his public image after he's been slandered on a global stage based on a internal-only memo that someone leaked to the public likely with the intent of ruining his life?
There is a point at which there is really nothing you can say to make a situation better, and you are better off just not saying anything further on the matter.
From the impression I've gleaned, Googlers seem to strongly believe what is said in Google stays in Google and people there believe their coworkers are generally open-minded, extremely intelligent individuals. He may have believed he was in an environment where this was not as much of a mistake as it very obviously, in hindsight, was.
I predict he'll be able to find a nice tech job eventually, and the biggest barrier he'll have to overcome is this lawsuit. There are plenty of companies who aren't so sensitive to this kind of PR and and flap around his hiring will die out quickly.
I was once identified as a chartered statistician, presumably sympathetic, by a fringe group (fun people collecting Nazi memorabilia, something that happens to get you in jail where I was at the time). Several members reached out to me to draft or sign op-eds on things like homosexual parenthood, sexuality transmittable disease and ethnicity, etc. They were clearly well financed and they had an opinion to defend (which actually makes the job easier). I refused because they didn’t have any data to support their claim so I wasn’t sure what I could do other than discrediting myself instantly (I was not very politically savvy at the time). I had a clear feeling there was a path from paid drafts to signed papers, to book deals that would have made me rich.
Whether James Damore is willing to go there is a more difficult question.
Palantir or Peter Thiel will just have him well.
> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering
Why do news outlets persistently misrepresent what he actually said? I've read his memo and just about every news article says it contains claims that it doesn't. I have no view on whether he's right or not, but I remain shocked at the misrepresentation of his views throughout the tech media.
I used to think HN provided a good balance of open-mindedness and tech topics. It was a nice refuge from places like reddit and Twitter that had become overly politicized. In the last year - in particular since Damore's little lesson about shitting where you eat - the same kind of smarmy calls for "tolerance of different opinions" mixed with constant brigading of people (talk abut "tolerance") have taken over HN.
I really hope for our community's sake that it's just a small number of users ruining it for everyone.
> "automatic downvoting"
Let's set aside the idea that they're automatic for a moment. Unless your mind reading skills are better than mine, it's hard to know the intent from a downvote alone. You can't even know who did it, other than it's not the person you responded to.
> "of non-controversial, easily-proven statements"
Even these may not be constructive to the conversation. They may be tangential, irrelevant, or intentionally misleading. Members may downvote for any of these reasons.
> "comments with highly subjective and inflammatory takes get upvoted show the worst this community has to offer."
Yeah, highly charged comments can get upvoted: emotions are a powerful thing, and there's a lot of evidence (is it even controversial at this point?) that emotions fire before rational thought. And there's increasing evidence that our rationality actual does more to rationalize our emotions than work as some sort of logic engine. People have to work against this, and that, indeed, is effort. Frustrating? Incredibly so. Human? Very.
That's not to say we shouldn't work against this, at least some of the time. Internet fora make this all the more difficult because we're engaging with such limited bandwidth. We don't get to hear tone, or see facial expressions. We only have this limited text stream, and so we're likely bringing a lot more of ourselves to fill in the gaps than we often realize.
There's a lot of charged language in your comment here. That's just an observation, not a judgement. How should I respond to that? Should I attempt to put it to the side and respond in a way I think is most effective? Or should I write you off as some hot head that can't control their commenting, going against site guidelines by complaining about voting? Or just silently downvote you for doing so? I often get the impression that that's how some members perceive others as behaving. I don't think that's a useful starting point from which to improve HN, so it's one I consciously choose not to take.
> "a small number of users"
I think it's a combination of a small number of users and the fact that each of us—just because we're human—can sometimes slip. What we can do the rest of the time is not let the slip-ups of others make us respond in kind. It takes more than one person to spread the flames.
Help make HN the place you want it to be. Submit good articles. Write good comments. Upvote good articles and comments. Downvote and flag those you don't think are appropriate for HN. It sounds like you follow HN, so you know how threads on contentious articles go. Do what you can to make it better. (And make a conscious effort to not make it worse.) That includes commenting within the guidelines, such as not commenting on downvotes or mentioning you're flagging articles or complaining that a submission is inappropriate for HN. If you really think there's abuse going on, do contact the mods via the contact link in the footer: they want members to bring things like that to their attention so they can address it.
Honestly, there's really little else you can do, but I think it's enough. Which is why I'm taking the time for this comment. Anyway, best wishes.
Not if it is anything resembling a reasonable interpretation of the text.
I'm not weighing in on whether this evidence (which was based on SAT, IIRC) is correct or has been interpreted validly. I'm just pointing out that this was what Damore claimed (after the snafu arose—so take with at least a grain of salt) this statement was in reference to. I'd love to know if others have different information, especially if it was in earlier drafts of the doc.
In this case, TC would argue that they are distilling his memo by using the phrase "biologically less capable of engineering". Personally (and as a former lawyer, but not a libel lawyer), I think this position is not especially strong, since he focused mostly, if not exclusively, on inclination-type evidence. If you're going to give a one-sentence summary of the memo, you probably shouldn't refer to ability instead of inclination.
And given that the person they're talking about just sued Google, I'd say it's unwise to use a characterization like this—even if it is ultimately legally justifiable. Why not say "biologically less suited for engineering", which would encompass the possibility of both ability and desire?
Maybe you shouldn't, but it ain't libel.
From the memo:
"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"
preferences and abilities he says.
He suggests ways to alter Google's engineering jobs to suit abilities females are more likely to excel at, such as making work more social.
Its almost like different doesn't mean worse.
oh and diversity programs are bad. for some reason.
The person who isn't interested wouldn't even be applying in the industry in the first place.
Also, notice that interest doesn't necessarily translate into performance, as there are plenty of factors that affect performance besides "general interest in tinkering with things." Some of the worst performers I've met were obsessive "language experts" who enjoyed gaming (another "male" trait) and spent their weekends on their computers. Their apparent obsession didn't make them more performant than parents who spent nights and most weekends with their kids.
He was fired for a reason.
This is the heart of the lawsuit.
Unless you mean he was fired as part of a witch hunt which was much ado about nothing, and that's a sad fact of basing firing decisions on tweets. That is true.
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and ignoring our requests to stop. If you keep doing that we will ban you.
> I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” 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.
He said exactly that, right there. Why do conservatives always appear to defend this guy and try to pretend the memo wasn't full of repugnant crap.
I think if he had made a better written argument that focused more clearly on the idea that part of the gender gap is due to a lack of interest by women, that he probably still would be employed.
> 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
None of this says anything about the abilities of any individual women. There are many excellent female engineers. Nor does it say that these excellent women engineers don't face discrimination because of their gender. All it says is that you'd expect fewer women to be represented in the population of the most competent engineers (in the same way you find fewer men in veterinary fields, for example).
Given there is a section in the memo with similar verbiage as the article's quote, I would give some slack to the author if the sentiment remained from the original. However the author's quote changes the meaning of what Damore said quite a bit.
[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.
e.g. It would be like me suggesting you wrote: "men and women are different 'repugnant crap'". It's accurate, but misrepresentative of what you meant. One is honest, and the other is dishonest.
Personally I say give everyone the same rights (i.e single people) and a large part of the problem would go away.
B = biological causes
... A differs in part due to B ...
... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership.
Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma.
He does not mention performance, just preference.
> the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes
From the article:
> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering
Do you not see the difference?
It's always the same kind of crap from bigots. "Women MIGHT be less capable of engineering." "Black people MIGHT be more prone to crime." "Gay people MIGHT be more likely to be pedophiles." and it's always based in bigotry, not in science or evidence.
The second sentence wasn't written by Damore, so why attribute to him what he didn't write?
For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks.
Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. There may be some intrinsic bias towards man-thought embedded in the entire toolchain.
As a thought experiment, imagine a computing system designed from the ground up by women, with no input whatsoever from existing systems or concepts. A group of females are placed in a time stasis bubble with no outside communication, and emerge from it only after they develop a computing ecosystem of equal capabilities to the existing one.
With this in mind, now give all new students in the pipeline the option to try out both, then choose between the new system and the old for the entire remainder of their career. In this experiment, try to determine whether, after 20 years, the overall balance between sexes is equal, and whether the balance within each system is biased to one sex or the other.
If Babbage and Lovelace had further developed their computational mills, Lady Ada's influence over early programming might have snowballed, such that software development would have been sex-biased towards women from the start. As it is, the ecosystem currently sex-biased towards men was created mostly by men, simply as a matter of feedback. In order to make the existing ecosystem less intrinsically biased in the future, it needs to be shaped by a less-unbalanced group now.
So the natural biological differences are irrelevant. A fair system would have caused those differences to cancel out or complement each other through equal participation. To make the unfair system more fair, you have to force it, against its natural flow toward unfairness.
It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.
1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time
2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field.
These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).
If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.
My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.
I agree and acknowledge that. But many other fields are much older than computing, and arose independently in separate countries (medicine, childcare, law, organised crime, nursing, farming, cooking, construction, etc). If your hypothesis were true we should expect strong, consistent gender biases in all those fields. And we would expect that the dominant gender in different fields would vary across different cultures. But we see the opposite of that in the world - the dominant gender in different professions is remarkably consistent between isolated cultures. In the case of child care its even consistent cross-species.
SSC had a much more in-depth analysis than I'll manage in this comment. The onus is on you to explain why we don't see that actually happen in the world, as would be predicted by your theory.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
> The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.
I understand why this feels true, but in practice it is easier today than it has ever been to make novel user interfaces for programmers and users. There are no gatekeepers between you and your code editor. Please experiment with this; I'd love to see what you come up with.
Your understanding isn't correct, at least for nursing.
Nurses were male until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing#History give examples of predominately nurses and caregivers in other cultures before that time. http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu... says "Before modern day nursing, men were nurses, not women. The earliest recorded nursing school was established in India around 250 B.C. It was exclusively for men; women were not allowed to attend because it was believed that women were not as pure as men."
What happened in the 1800s? Quoting from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1081399.pdf :
> Through the efforts of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, nursing was established as a women's profession (Hus, Chen & Lou, 2010). Nightingale's image of the nurse as subordinate, nurturing, domestic, humble, and self-sacrificing, as well as not too educated, became prevalent in society. The American Nursing Association ostracized men from nursing until 1930, when as a "result of a bylaw amendment, provision was made for male nurses to become members of the American Nurses' Association" (In Review - American Nurses' Association, p. 6). Looking back in nursing history, Florence Nightingale, and the American Nursing Association ostracized men from the nursing profession.'
See also http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.... , "History appears to indicate that men have had a place in nursing for as long as records are available, but their contribution has been perceived as negligible, largely because of the dominant influence that the 19th century female nursing movement has had on the occupation's historical ideology."
> The term nosocomial originates from the latin nosocomi, the name given to male care-givers, meaning that men were prominent in Ancient Rome
... If they needed a special word for male care-givers in ancient rome, that implies they assumed care givers were female by default.
I don't see how you can therefore infer that men weren't the majority of nurses back then.
As for the term "nosocomi", it doesn't imply that care givers were female by default. Latin is a gendered language. A different word would have been applied to female caregivers. As an example from Spanish, think "maestro" and "maestra" for male and female teacher, respectively.
If the Latin only used the masculine form, and never the feminine, then it indicates the job was primarily (or perhaps only) done by men.
Consider the word "maid", short for "maiden" meaning "female virgin." We have a special word for female domestic workers but that doesn't imply that domestic workers were male by default.
Similary, in many English speaking parts of the world, a senior or supervisory nurse is a "sister". This title includes males, eg. from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282839878_Clinical_... "… what was nice there was a senior male sister that welcomed us and orientated us, so that really help me a lot to accept the situation …".
A male sister may also be referred to using the gender neutral term "charge nurse".
Again you see that a gendered term for a given job does not imply that job is usually done by the other gender.
Or, we have "mailman", "chairman", "cabin boy" for jobs which were usually done by males, while "charwoman", "lunch lady", and "call girl" indicate females. The existence of a special gendered term doesn't mean the mail was usually delivered by women, or that prostitutes were usually men.
How many people with top engineering skills do you think flip patties at McDonalds? Probably not many. Does that mean they're worse at flipping patties? No, it means they want to work elsewhere.
I have a lot of problems with how the issue was raised by Damore and I think his firing was appropriate, but I also agree that his essay has been wildly mischaracterized by the media.
If you want to make a case that someone means something other than what they clearly say (or write) then you should have a convincing argument to justify such a claim. Otherwise you're just projecting your prejudices on the discussion.
Are you seriously saying that the meaning I should take away from that quote is that women don't work in tech because of their superior ability?
And the quote we're arguing about, "women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering", also says "may". So it seems you're arguing a strawman.
So an overly simplified argument might be women don't work in tech because they both prefer, and are superior in, different working environments.
What you should take away from his quote is nothing. Especially the paraphrased portion of the quote that ignores preferences. Read his memo in it's entirety and judge it in it's entirety.
I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.
So it's your projection of what you assume he really thinks. What evidence are you basing this on?
He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.
The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.
That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.
> 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.
Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.
Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.
As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.
That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.
You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.
The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".
I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.
[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.
[1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-...
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
[3] https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_funny_thing_happ...
> 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.
Edit: ebbv beat me to it
(a) There is no consistent world view for tens of millions of people distributed across the globe, (b) there is no research, none, that specifically states that women are genetically predisposed to be less suited to engineering and (c) there is no clear rules about what aspects of our biology are required to be a great engineer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3030621/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4129348/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4157091/
Maybe these studies are wrong, maybe the conclusions Damore drew were wrong (I certainly think they are). However, I think witch-hunting people for asking questions about sensitive topics is a much more clear and present danger.
Nobody is arguing that men and women aren't biologically different. Of course they are. The point is whether those biological differences significantly affect your ability to be a professional engineer.
And you or Damore have provided zero evidence of this.
To rephrase what I'm talking about: some studies say women are less good at spatial reasoning than men -- maybe you can make an argument that Task X requires spatial reasoning skills. Assuming that argument is true it would stand to reason that statistically more men are capable of doing Task X than women. That's a far cry from saying women lack the ability to do Task X.
To refrain, I think Damore's conclusions are probably wrong. However I think there's a shocking abundance of willful ignorance whenever this topic gets raised.
You speak of willful ignorance, yet talk of studies you don't even link nor explain why they have anything to do with this. Why would this study about spatial reasoning by more important than e.g. SAT scores? How does that actually relate to women becoming engineers when there is no shortage of women who are capable of completing a CS degree?
You also seem to suggest that Damore's voice is important because other people aren't talking about this. As well as that people who disagree with him doesn't do so legitimately but because they don't like his opinions. That people don't talk about this isn't true, they just don't reach the same conclusions. Here is one example from the summery of the study "The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics":
"We conclude that early experience, biological factors, educational policy, and cultural context affect the number of women and men who pursue advanced study in science and math and that these effects add and interact in complex ways. There are no single or simple answers to the complex questions about sex differences in science and mathematics."
So why doesn't Damore, or yourself, mention a study like this that can be easily be found online?
No body is arguing against the right of women to become engineers. It's just stating that the assumption that "hidden bias" exists if a field is not at 50/50 is untrue. and by the way, I'm yet to find any proof for that. if you find a study that indicates no discirimination leads to 50/50 in all fields or at least in engineering I will be happy to read it.
So, to me this reads as bias. When I read his claim, I don't see it as implying that women are in any way less capable of becoming professional engineers, but (in context to his other assertions) that they are less likely to desire becoming a professional engineer.
Equally valid is having is that having to work with socially inept people reduces the appeal.
I'll freely offer that nothing in his paper affirms my interpretation of his view any more than yours, but if the only difference is that I'm more willing to assume good faith where you are not, then perhaps that's reason enough to not demand that he be insta-fired from any job he ever get, as many are asking to happen.
Some state that this a culture problem and that there is a hidden bias.
Some also state that women might go to other fields because they have a greater capacity at empathy. which is a proven fact. women that go and study those fields won't apply to cs positions they will apply to positions in their fields.
and by the way there was a study that indicated that women get short-listed less in sex-blind hiring
"The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview."
"Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
this is getting downvoted with no replies if someone has a porblem with what I said, I'm happy to debate.
Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
...No it doesn't. That's just something you're adding to preserve the distinction.
>Like, male and female high jumpers that make it over a certain height of bar are approximately as good at jumping. There's more men in that category. This all might be playing semantics, but I think there's a real thing here to disentangle, and it'd be nice to say one without implying the other.
Yes yes but the problem comes with Damore's reasoning for why there are more men in that category - biological determination of better programming ability.
Whether or not the representation gap is biological is an important factual matter that should be discussed on the merits. It'd do women no good to try to get their best sprint times up to men's by fixing society to be more accepting of female sprinters. There are real biological differences between the sexes, and trying to fix downstream effects of them by making up sociological causes and attacking them is very quixotic.
I think a sociological explanation for any biological phenomena has to be made up. This is why we need to have an honest discussion about the merits of biological explanations, so that we can figure out the root causes and spend our efforts effectively.
He also suggested that if the goal is for Google to become more inclusive toward women, that perhaps the roles should be adjusted to appeal more to women than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend the problem is Google's patriarchy.
If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
You're sneaking in your "prefer" with your "generally". Damore didn't speak just to preference, he also spoke to ability.
>If you run a burger place and want more women to eat there, you start serving salads. That doesn't mean you're a sexist for thinking women can't eat burgers. Some do. But generally speaking, women eat salads at higher rates than men. You will not be as successful by trying to market the same burgers to women.
Great analogy. So in terms of burgers/salads & men/women Damore is saying that there are biological reasons to believe that women prefer salads to burgers and that there are biological reasons to believe that men are better at eating burgers.
So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
I think the analogy exposes exactly the problem with Damore's memo.
Ability follows as a result of preference. I am a terrible architect because I chose to become a software engineer. That does not mean that if I had chosen to become an architect, I would be terrible at it. If most of the people from my hometown made the same choice, then most of us would be less good at architecting due to that preference.
> So now let me ask you, do you think women prefer salads because of biology, or do you think that women prefer salads because of culture? You can say both but if so maybe you could say which one you think is the larger influence and by how much.
Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
> Also, do you think that men are biologically better at eating burgers? Is this the reason they are more likely to order a burger?
No, but I do think if you're running a burger place and refuse to acknowledge the possibility that different groups of customers prefer different things, you're going to be out of business soon. Fortunately restaurant menu choices haven't been politically charged--yet.
See everyone I talk to about Damore only tries to defend the preference portion. This isn't the only argument Damore is making. He believes abilities, not just preferences, are distributed differently between men and women. That's what I'm asking you to defend.
>Personally I think it's almost entirely culture. I couldn't say how much is what, but it makes no difference. The point is that it undermines the incumbent narrative, which is that sexism and oppression are the only significant causes.
It doesn't really undermine anything. When we move to salads it's super obvious that almost all of the effect is cultural not biological. So some burger stores start an initiative to get women to worry less about the cultural expectations placed on them and eat a damn burger but disgruntled Wendy's employee Damore writes an internal 10 page memo explaining that women don't eat burgers because they are biologically predisposed to salads. He digs up research about the vitamins and minerals contained in leafy greens, spends a ton of time tip-toeing around what he means to say, and couches everything in "distributional" language. At the end of the day it's obvious that this memo by a layman about why women prefer salads biologically is (1) ridiculous on it's face (2) not scientific and (3) actively harmful to his employer's goals.
But put that way it's obvious why he was fired and Damore looks less like a free-speech hero and more like bigoted faux-science dweeb.
> are distributed differently between men and women.
And that, as far as I know, is the current scientific consensus.
In particular, women who excel at the Math SATs tend to also excel at the Verbal SATs. Whereas men who excel at the Math SATs tend to only excel at the Math SATs.
And people, regardless of gender, who have both capabilities tend to go into non-STEM fields.
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/wh...
https://herosports.com/nfl/women-fastest-growing-market-foot...
wow, a decade of marketing overpowered millenia of biology ad cultural history.
No, it doesn't. It suggests fewer women are good. It doesn't suggest that the women in the field are any worse than the men in the field, it just explains why there may be fewer women than men.
I know I am.
this argument uses "Distribution of...abilities" without indicating in any part that women are worse at anything.
the phrase “Distribution of...abilities” does not suggest that “women are worse.”
"fewer women wind up having the skills for X in part due to biological causes" and "women are worse at X".
source:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
from the abstract: "This study contributes information on women's greater empathic disposition in comparison with men by means of a longitudinal design in an adolescent population"
there is also this study: "Testosterone may reduce empathy by reducing brain connectivity" http://www.psypost.org/2016/03/testosterone-may-reduce-empat...
"Half of the women were given an orally administered dose of testosterone sufficient to increase the levels of the hormone in their blood by a factor of ten, while the other half received a placebo. The women who were given testosterone subsequently took significantly longer to identify the emotions depicted images of eyes, and made significantly more errors while doing so."
"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ○ We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
● Women on average are more cooperative ○ Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do. ○ This doesn't mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn't necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what's been done in education."
This is different than my point. I'm saying that software engineering IS people-oriented as it exists and that it's simply undervalued.
> Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be
What roles at Google shouldn't be people-oriented? This just strikes me as an absurd thing to say.
So no, I would say the original quote is not a good summary of the quote you quoted.
As for the distibution of preferences based on sex. While some might claim that sex does not affect preferences. A Meta-study found robust sex differences in children’s toy Indicating that sex "might" be a factor in deciding factor. The categorical refusal of this claim to the point the mere fact of suggesting that it "might" be true let alone asserting it is taboo, is scientifically unfounded.
source: Study finds robust sex differences in children’s toy preferences across a range of ages and countries http://www.psypost.org/2017/12/study-finds-robust-sex-differ...
People barely have any idea about how to hire a software engineer, much less judge someone's true "ability".
Preferences are also very complicated. People may prefer things very differently given the environment. That quote, along with many others, demonstrates the absolute lack of genuineness on the part of Damore.
Damore throws away any pretense of being objective/scientific when he makes claims like this based on metrics that are hardly measurable. A decent scientist would recognize that making claims with very serious implications like this is greatly irresponsible.
I'm not sure how you get from (1) his logic seems flawed, to (2) he's being disingenuous. Can you please elaborate?
2) He has an preconceived theory of how "ability" and "preference" work. The science does not point to his conclusions, because the science cannot point to any conclusions: ability is simply not scientifically understood or defined at all in the software engineering field, and preferences are barely understood and have many weird consequences (Dan Ariely's work is a great example of this). He is being disingenuous because he is making a claim without any ability to back it up, simply because it fits with his preconceived theory. That's disingenuous. If he were to say, "It seems to me that", or "What I've seen in my life is...", instead of making a strict claim. A strict claim requires actual evidence and well defined terms, both of which he has none.
Hmm...as to preferences, there are two easy tests:
1. You ask people
When you do, you find that people generally don't like CS. People in developed countries less than in less developed countries. And women less than men, with the gap becoming bigger in more developed countries. And girls less than boys, with the gap becoming larger in more developed countries.
You can also ask them why they choose that way, and in less developed or less prosperous countries, more people say "because of the money". In more prosperous countries, people are, well, more prosperous, so money is less of an issue.
2. You look at how people choose
Same pattern. It's not as if women are forced out of computing and into early childhood education. They choose to go there because, apparently, that is what they want to do.
I think many women have preferences that steer them away from engineering, this may be societal or genetic in nature but that's something that is being debated at this point.
I think saying his use of the word abilities is what gets him in a lot of trouble here.
Because this creates controversy, controversy creates engagement and engagement brings more ad revenue to the news outlets.
"Misunderstanding statistical distribution" https://medium.com/@martinweigert/misunderstanding-probabili...
He suggested that on average men are biologically more suited to programming, and the contention of his opponents is that that is still a problematic and inappropriate thing to say.
Stating "members from group X are better than members from group y" (which is how Damore's opponents describe his claim) is a not the same as stating that “more people from group X than from group Y might be suitable for this job”. The first is qualitative, the latter quantitative. The latter also implies that members of group y can be as good.
I am sure everyone has experienced how sentences and context radically can change through the addition or omission of just one or two words. Here we have such a case, and it should be acknowledged.
But the problem is that it isn't any more quantitative because it still depends on the highly subjective notion of what it means to be "suitable for this job" and assumes that there is only one way to be "suitable."
This is different from discriminatory hiring of women to be forced into a male oriented role. This is a substantive claim, which he accuses Google of doing. Discriminatory hiring is illegal, and also stupid, from a free market standpoint.
Tldr: If women aren't buying your product (not applying to Google), it's not the fault of women, its your product that needs to change to suit their wants and needs.
This is only sexist if you think men and women don't, as a general statistical rule, tend toward different interests along a bimodal distribution. But they do.
"James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board that was perceived by many to argue that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"
They can also point out that he denied he argued this, and that there is plenty of disagreement over whether his memo said it or not.
I know plenty of folks are saying they read it and don't see how one can interpret it any other way. But the fact that you get so many comments indicating they did not interpret it that way is a strong indicator of a lack of consensus. The way the article is written implies a certainty, and does not reflect the reality around the memo.
Essentially, to insist that this is what Damore meant, based only on his memo, is insisting that a huge number of HN posters are playing the same game Damore is. It's much easier to believe that there are other valid interpretations of the memo and to allow for the possibility that Damore had one of the other interpretations.
From the memo:
> 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.
Minus a bit of softening language ("in part", "may"), proposing that women are on average less biologically capable of programming is exactly what he's saying.
Also, because I know how HN works, let me pre-empt the inevitable reply to this one: "but what if there ARE sex differences?! shouldn't we be allowed to talk about that!? Freedom of speech!?!"
Scientists who study this stuff (including those cited by Damore) can and do talk about it, and the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech. What effects there may be are absolutely dominated by sociological factors.
Sociological factors that some companies are attempting to counter, which is what Damore didn't like, which is why he issued his complain-y memo to start with.
And THAT is why people are upset with him. Not because he's an amateur biologist with a day job as a programmer who just earnestly wants to have an innocent conversation about sexual dimorphism. It's because he's just another brogrammer whose jimmies got rustled by the thought of women being his peers, and decided to insult (on average) his female colleagues and create a hostile work environment for which he was (quite correctly) fired.
Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.
Hey, let's keep things civil. Please consider Hanlon's Razor in this case.
How about something like, "I don't think you're correct about the consensus. Citations please?"
> “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me.)”
For more, check out the citations on this article: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16153740/tech-diversity-p...
Finally, even if the facts were true that women on averaged perform worse in tech, how do you want to use that information? Cancel all the sensitivity programs designed to solve other very real problems in tech? Or are you saying not only that biology "plays a role", but that _nothing else does_ so we should just completely ignore this as an issue?
In other words, "that's not the kind of question we ask."
Also I looked at the citations, neither of the metastudies looks at differences in sensory perception which imho are the most interesting of the sex differences. But even ignoring that, looking at the statistical significance of certain population traits doesn't tell you anything about their clinical significance. E.g. if you look at two groups of 100 people and one group is 100% alive and the other group is 99% alive, there isn't a significant effect size, but there is a big difference to that one person.
[citation needed]
But what seems to be missing (and what I had hoped for) is research showing that "the consensus is that biological sex differences are not that big of an effect, certainly not enough to explain the gender disparity in tech." I feel like the article should be overflowing with references to this if it's a consensus.
It turns out that even this article admits that
> there’s very little scientists know for certain about which behaviors are due to biology, and which are because of society’s expectations of both men and women
The article essentially concludes that men are competitive.
Maybe I missed something in the article. Which citation really spoke to you and confirmed this consensus?
After having read two lengthy pieces about him and his case, I think you are showing a lack of empathy and willingness to put yourself into some other person's shoes. You might disagree with his actions and world view. But you should maybe not be so quick with your labeling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam... http://quillette.com/2018/01/05/empathy-gap-tech-interview-s...
And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?
Or do you mean the autism excuse (which is from the Guardian journalist, btw, not Damore himself?) I know lots of people on the autism spectrum who are not sexist, or who at least have the intelligence not to send out a memo to the whole company on a nuanced, controversial social topic
"And if we're worried about empathy, why don't we stop and think for a while about the people affected negatively by his memo?" I do. It's you who falsely assumes one can only do one thing.
That being said nobody had a negative reaction until vox leaked it. It had been available for months.
I will also note it seemed to be those who have more tweets than minutes they have been alive that got the most upset about this memo.
I was really disappointed in the response by Google engineers. To this day I have yet to see a proper rebuttal that did not go out of it's way to misrepresent the original memo.
That is what makes me sad. That to this day people still quote things that were not in or even eluded to in the paper.
The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.
I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.
1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic.
2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
That is literally the whole point of his memo, that women have a different (i.e, worse, in this context) statistical distribution of ability and inclination to the tech field.
> “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
Sure it is. His argument is structured as follows:
1. Negative effect Q is caused by both A and B. 2. We can't do anything about A. 3. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about B.
That's just bad reasoning.
Damore's manifesto purports to present evidence that there "maybe" are inherent differences between genders ("may" and "might" are also sprinkled all over the place for good measure.) He even acknowledges that this is far from a complete picture. But then he goes on to conclude that:
1) That must explain the existing gender distribution in engineering
2) Google trying to explore doing outreach to increase diversity must necessarily imply discrimination of the unfairly oppressed white heterosexual male
So trying to dismiss all criticism by splitting hairs over whether he meant that the average, the median, or all women are uninterested in engineering completely misses the point that either way the conclusions are unwarranted. The whole thing smacks of persecution complex first, finding "evidence" later.
No, he's saying that they also might be less interested, for biological reasons. I recommend actually reading the memo (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...): "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men."
I recommend you start realizing that people can read something and interpret it in vastly different ways.
Of course then you might have a revelation about this whole thing.
That isn't my interpretation at all. His entire point was that Google's current strategy was ignoring the cultural and sociological factors that might be discouraging women from entering the field. Rather than simply giving women preferential treatment during the hiring process, and going out of the way to specifically hire women, he argued that we should be spending more time identifying why women aren't naturally drawn to the field (or why more women later choose to leave the field). Fix that problem first, or the women that get hired will eventually leave, because we haven't done enough to consider why they don't feel welcome.
He never said that women are unfit to be engineers. He argued (clumsily, I admit) that we've created an environment that favors the preferences and strengths of men over those of women. If we want to see more women thrive in tech, start by changing the culture.
I think that most of the outrage over Damore's memo can be chalked up to poor communication on his part. He lays out evidence, but he never explicitly states his argument. It's like he assumed there was a single, obvious conclusion that readers would arrive at. Some of us got the message, but apparently a whole lot more didn't. The outcome is almost perfect in its irony: he cites a greater emphasis on empathy as a way of making the engineering field more hospitable to women, but he fails miserably at using empathy to evaluate how people will interpret his own words.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
There's Grant's response added by Scott to the comments [0], but I don't think that really qualifies as a rebuttal.
[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...
And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.
ugh.
I am happy he got his ass fired.
[0]: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/18/james-damore-like-g...
[1]: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450202/google-employees...
When the majority of people are too afraid to come to someone's defense (publicly) because they're afraid that the internet pitchfork mobs will come and destroy their lives too, a large part of society is doing something wrong.
And that large part of society that attempts to do the silencing/shaming/smearing/destroying of the opposition might think they're scoring a victory for their cause (whether or not that cause is worthy is beside the point), but that's not necessarily true, and we saw proof of that in the last US election.
When Clinton got millions more votes?
As a manager you have to think about everyone in the team.
I'm having some difficulty understanding your statement. Would you mind clarifying a few things?
- Do you mean all Americans, or just some?
- When you say "do not understand", what do you mean by that?
- I'm unclear as to why you specifically mentioned Americans. Are you comparing them to some other group(s)? And if so, which one(s)?
Be aware, 60% of Republicans belie e that the earth really is only 6,000 years old.
By not understanding he means that, that they don't understand that they don't understand that in distribution when traits are different on a average that that doesn't mean that in one group all individuals of one groups have stronger or weaker traits than individuals of the other group.
Heh. I rest my case.
But, to respond directly: of course, I'm speaking colloquially to suggest many Americans.
I specifically mention Americans because this discussion is about an American suing an American company, in a kerfuffle over American ideals (and law) of sex nondiscrimination. American education norms seem to leave even bright people susceptible to deep confusion when claims are based on statistics.
I'm Irish.
I cannot believe that most of you still go with the media narrative that Damore claimed "women are worse than man at engineering" while this is a very obvious misrepresentation of what he wrote in order to fill a narrative.
This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
And it kills me that smart people in HN are falling for it so easily.
> 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.
[...]
> This is all part of a politically driven agenda that destroys everyone trying to question the unique, politically-correct acceptable way of thinking.
This is nonsensical. He wrote bullshit, he caused a problem at his office of employment, he was fired. End of discussion. If you end up pissing off most of your co-workers it leads to a hostile environment so you remove the fewest amount of people to fix it. It doesn't even matter if what he wrote is or isn't correct at that point.
He speaks about the `distribution of preferences and abilities`.
Going from a distribution to state that `women are worse then men at engineering` is a false narrative and COMPLETELY different. You probably didn't realize that because you already made your own politically-correct version of the truth on that subject, and refuse any discussion about those topics.
For example, what he said doesn't say anything about two specific individual women and men abilities.
About your second point. That's the whole issue! Bringing up any point of debate or discussion on those politically-driven topics will end up pissing of some people (while a majority might agree, but will stay silent because politically incorrect). It is very very sad that this is the state of affairs, and that we cannot discuss those sensible subjects anymore without being fully ostracized.
If you read the full memo, you understand what he aims at and I don't think it is poorly written.
Given this `distribution of preferences and abilities` he said that women on average were lower, but if you only hire people above a certain threshold, there is no difference in the people you hire. This is not true.
Unless the `distribution` is binary "has ability / does not have ability", the people coming from the "higher average" distribution will still on average have more ability. For example, say X~N(1,1) and Y~N(2,1) are normal-distributed with standard deviation 1 and mean 1 and 2 respectively, then E[X | X > 3] ≈ 3.37, while E[Y | Y > 3] ≈ 3.53.
I am pretty sure Damore doesn't think preference and ability are binary, so unless he's confused about his maths, he does say that women at Google on average have less preference/ability.
I could now point "confused or insincere" right back at you ...
But at least this whole debate is wonderful example why you should not assume bad faith in others.
That sounds like an interesting argument. I don't think Damore made it, but if you will flesh it out a bit more, I'd be very interested in reading it.
And thanks, I'm thinking about making blog a lot, but I have no time.
Here is a female first authored study from 2013 focused on the topic of Damore's memo exactly.
http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...
> The findings suggest that the persistent – and usually neglected average large advantage of boys in mechanical reasoning (MR) — orthogonal to g – might be behind their higher presence in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.
Example: average ability score of 100, standard deviation of 16 and average ability score of 90, standard deviation of 32. The 95th percentile cutoff for the first group would be about 164; the 95th percentile cutoff for the second group would be about 218. So even though the average member of group 1 has a higher ability score than the average member of group 2, an organisation which hired the best 5% of all candidates would have disproportionately more members of group 2 than group one.
In the best case, that argument only has a little utility. However, it's a pretty bad argument now, since political correctness only allows you to make those kinds of swaps in certain cases. Nowadays, it can only be use to amplify the outrage against an already-identified villain.
"Birth control for blacks", "we need more jews in STEM", "no blacks in the whites only bathroom".
They're more offensive because unlike race there are very real and relevant biological differences when it comes to gender. And whether or not that applies to STEM probably shapes your viewpoints on this subject.
Pre-election a similar thing happened to James Watson and Larry Summers - eg here is shutting down conversation about humans not being blank slates:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard-chief-defends-h...
"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said.
Its two problems our industry literally created: Sensationalist click farming and information overload. Our industry does not take these problems seriously enough. Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
You need to learn that people can have a different opinion then you, having read the same document.
> Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.
Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally. You had an employee that others would refuse to work with.
Of course he was fired.
How did he cause an external outrage? Did he leak the document to the press? Did he speak to the press at all?
There are quite a few people to blame for the external outrage, but he is not one of them.
His lawsuit is not BS; you should try reading the court filing. He has multiple examples of Google HR officially condoning systemic racism and sexism. Who knows how it will come out, but he has a case.
What he did was speak heresy. I’m sorry that it sounds like I’m a butthurt male but the fact is diversity is dogma in these companies and you either buy in wholeheartedly, constantly, to the exclusion of all other priorities, or you’re ex-communicated.
He says he is only trying to start a conversation or discussion, but circulating a secret memo around your company and then going on a self-promotional media crusade really is not a great way to do that. It looks more like a political stunt, which is pretty much the opposite of a conversation.
>then going on a self-promotional media crusade
If internally sharing a document within a company is bad, and externally talking about it once it was made public by another party who got you fired is also bad, what is in your opinion the acceptable and appropriate method to have this conversation?
But you're right, though, now that I'm reflecting, my portrayal of him was too harsh. After all, the man did get fired for writing a letter. THAT is ridiculous and I hope he wins the suit just for that.
The whole thing is embarrassing, though. I mean, what was he complaining about? He worked at Google, which is like, the top of the heap for programming jobs. I didn't understand why he was upset over the company's efforts to include women more. Did he not understand why that would be seen as sexist?
The more I think about it, the more I realize the answer to that question might be no. Maybe Damore didn't realize that presenting his ideas in the form of a memo passed around the office would be insulting to some people. Maybe it was honestly the only way he knew how to initiate a discussion about it. And in that case, I do think he was mistreated and it's a shame he didn't have another way to voice his concerns.
I guess it's a lesson, but what to learn from it, I don't know.
Personally, looking at this from the outside and from the vantage point of today, I think the entire thing is overblown and also extremely typical considering the state of the Western world today.
I don't understand Google's internal culture at all.
Thank god at least someone in this mess was capable of reflecting and changing their opinion. Thanks for restoring my faith in humanity.
Discrimination of gender, race, and sexual preference is demonstrably real. This suit is a farce and I hope he loses.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
> Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.
Many media outlets omitted the italicized portion.
There are something like three to five times as many autistic males than females, depending on the cutoff point and study used. I'm honestly astounded that people are rejecting the biological claim, given how strongly it attracts autistics.
IMHO, a lot of inclusivity-in-tech movements are horrifically ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups. It's about goddamn time there's some push-back against these sorts of gentrifying movements, they're incredibly bad for the work environment interests of autistics.
However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger’s scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a small portion overall. That difference doesn’t come close to explaining the gender gap. Maybe you care for all introverts (who resent interruptions) including the majority of introverts who are neuro-typical. I do believe most programmers are introvert but I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion but I’d be surprised if it were large enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.
That's why I included the part about the programming work environment generally being unpleasant and demanding. I didn't make the connection explicit, but "high paying job that sucks" is a preferential attractor for male workers. 90% of workplace deaths are men, men tend to do more things like "work on dangerous and dirty oil rigs", men tend to work more hours than women, and women tend to accumulate in more personally rewarding jobs such as teaching or social work. The end result is a gross earnings gap that basically disappears when you control for these sorts of choices.
So to be explicit: becoming a programmer is a choice that pays well, but is difficult work, requires a large time commitment to study, and is not intuitively gratifying. On that basis alone I'd expect outsized male participation.
>I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion
In terms of big-5 personality traits, the gendered differences are that women tend to score higher on Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I don't think it's particularly relevant to this whole discussion, though.
The worst thing about your post (that isn't at all your fault), is that there isn't a strong argument for them palatable to the hegemony short of "ableism."
If the explanation in your first paragraph is true, then does it stand to reason that there are non-autistic people with weak soft skills? Or simply prefer an individualistic, distraction-free workplace?
My answer to this rhetorical question is: Yes, obviously, as long as you don't tautologically define anyone with a below-threshold appetite for social interaction at work as autistic.
It's fashionable in SV to talk of empathy, tolerance, acceptance etc... Yet from the outside I see a very close-minded bubble that demands people comport to so many social standards that nobody actually finds necessary for professionals to work productively. They'll let people get away with non-conformance only if they've got an excuse that would be a political landmine to cross (e.g. ableism re: autism).
But instead of identifying a specific, readily identifiable class that is affected, the classes in this suit are defined as any Google employee against whom Google engaged in certain classes of illegal discrimination in California in a given timeframe; this require litigating individual discrimination claims for each potential class member to determine if they are a class member. Since class members have to be identified and given a chance to opt-out before settlement or trial, this is impractical—its what a class action exists to avoid.
Compare to the Microsoft sex discrimination class action, which defined the class as all women employed in defined roles and levels in particular parts of the organization during a given timeframe.
Also, a class lead plaintiff’s claims—not just the law claimed to be violated but the specific manner—are supposed to be typical of the class; while it's very hard to make any guesses of what would be typical of such an ill-defined class, Damore’s case seems to all appearanced to be sui generis. Maybe I'm missing something, but the class action aspect here seems to be either a complete Hail Mary or a ploy for additional media attention.
How else would several subthreads of subthreads report 40+ replies in an hour once the whole thing is collapsed? There be demons.
Replace "white men" with "black woman" and they'd have a field day clutching pearls and fanning themselves silly.
Damore may be an insensitive autist... Or maybe he's one of the few sensitive to see through all the posturing.
Whether or not this is illegal, or true, this is an anti-pattern. If you want representation (and PR) hiring quotas are great; however, if you truly want to empower they work against your goals. At the end of the day any person who walks into a job because of a quota will question, "did I get this job because of my gender/race/creed/orientation?" While you have provided them with opportunity it would be very difficult for that person to fairly evaluate themselves and especially determine whether they are making progress in their career.
It's a nasty situation. We want to make progress as society, which means quantifying that progress (quotas make this impossible). However, at the same time we are trying to make that progress to represent individuals and, yes, place them in lucrative jobs to level the playing field (which quotas assist).
> reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates
That is to my point. How could you justify that position if you have no way of measuring it? Find 50 lions and 50 white lions, put them in an enclosure and ask a scientist to tell you what percentage of lions are white based on that sample.
I'm not saying that we don't have to solve this, or that it has been solved. It hasn't. I really question our approach (and I don't have a better alternative, apart from eradicating gender stereotypes from a young age).
Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?
No, things have gotten worse since the 90's. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_69... Women have a >40% quit rate, so it's not just the hiring practices which need work. https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/womenint... (PDF)
An easy explanation for higher quit rates is that the various programs to get more women into tech worked, but the percentage of women who actually want to be in tech hasn't budged.
When you interview both men and women, women actually report higher rates of support from their companies and superiors than the men. It is one of the few areas where there are differences. The other is "enjoy the work", which women rate a lot lower.
I think this is a common, and pretty unfounded claim that people make. In my experience, men and women are both perfectly capable of having harmful opinions on gender roles.
- Outreach to under-represented groups is a no-brainer (I assume Google is already doing this)
- Look at ways to make your interview / recruiting process as blind as possible - coding exercises, resume review and even behavioural questions can be done in a way that doesn't reveal someone's gender or race.
- Where blindness isn't possible, use data to figure out where there may be bias. Do certain individuals / teams / departments show bias in who they advance through the hiring process? If at least part of your process is blind this is even easier - look for evidence of candidates who did well until the process could no longer be gender / race blind and see if there's any bias introduced at that point.
OKRs mandating a fixed gender ratio are the worst way to go about things. It's supposedly common knowledge that any metric is going to be gamed, and doubly so if your career performance is based heavily on it, so it shouldn't be surprising that basing it heavily on a 50/50 ratio can often result in "hiring to quota". Long term, this ends up casting doubt on eminently qualified women and racialized folks.
Yeah, Google spent a quarter-billion dollars on racial diversity and got nowhere. https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/google-and-tech-struggle... So there's a metric they haven't even figured out how to game yet, that's how bad the situation is. As I replied to your sibling comment, the industry wouldn't need to hire so many women (and other tech minorities) if they could keep women from quitting so fast.
Some of the best female engineers I know hate pro-diversity movements because of this.
Another reason could be that it is easier to obtain emotional distance on a decision when you're not personally involved. Believing that something is best as an abstract policy doesn't always make it easy to believe it is best for you.
A third possibility is that he does believe that the market should decide, but that he also believes in taking full advantage of the system as it exists today.
As far as the second point, the free markets no longer operate that way, marketing has emerged as a white washing effect for any ill a company can get themselves into, as long as they spend enough on marketing they can work their way out of it on top.
I'm a libertarian who supports Damore in sprirt, but I don't love this lawsuit for the reasons given in the grandparent post.
What does this even mean? People booed simply because they were white and male? I honestly don't get it. And who did the booing?
If you had a high-profile case like this, are you choosing to defy the arbitration agreement? Anyone ever gone through this and willing to share the process?
I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...
Would be interesting to hear the opinion of the people with legal experience: what are the merits of the lawsuit?
My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination. Since white males are not protected class, the discrimination case is much weaker.
It is much easier for Google to settle this lawsuit than to deal with hundreds of others they would get should they kept Damore on payroll.
I think regardless of the merits of TFD this lawsuit is a good thing because companies would be less inclined to punish people for objecting groupthink.
Yes they are. Or at least whites and males are a protected class (at the suit alledges discrimination against these classes independently, not just their intersection).
It is true that the intent of the anti discrimination laws was to protect non-whites and females, codifying that into law would be a clear violation of the equal protections clause and make any such law unconstitutional.
>My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination.
The wrongful termination argument defiantly seems stronger here. However, it is worth keeping in mind that they have not settled yet. I assume Damore's laywers would have tried settling before even filing [0]. If Google wanted to settle they should have done it back than, before the PR hit of the suit being filed happened. Coming up is the PR hit of discovery, which is going to bring to light a lot of skeletons that Google would rather keep hidden. (Even if Google did nothing wrong with regards to this case; no organization the size of Google can go through discovery without something coming out)
[0] Assuming their actual goal is just money. They claim to be doing this to effect change. While their public statements on motivation are highly suspect, it is within the realm of reason that they are actually interested in this case for the political agenda, in which case they would want to take it to court.
0: [https://www.scribd.com/document/368689407/Damore-vs-Google-C...]
I have stopped reading TechCrunch, ArsTechnica and Vice magazine because they continually report this inaccurately (at best) if they are not outright lying.
Once again, Damore never says that women are biologically less capable. Nothing like this is every stated nor even implied. In fact he goes out of his way to say this is not so, in the memo. Frustrating.
It is illegal to prevent people from engaging in politics, in California.
This suggestion is illegal.
California law is extremely pro employee.
Google obviously has a lot of reasons to fire Damore but they do not even need a reason.
Former Google engineer sitting at home unemployed and unable to find a job supports he should have been fired.
And google definitely didn't fire him for no reason.
It is illegal to engage in "Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office."
Here is the california law in question:
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...
If there are smoking gun emails that say "We are going to fire him for his politics", then Google broke the law.
All this information will come out during the lawsuit, and during discovery, if it exists.
I put political in quotes back there simply because it's a word that can be bent in all sorts of directions to mean anything from Politics to simply having an opinion on something. Remember, the opinion might be highly offensive and make working with others, on a team, more difficult.
I'm no lawyer, but I don't see how this would make any difference.
Consider that a black man in rural Mississippi in the 1960s would have had a very difficult time serving white patrons at a restaurant; I don't think "people didn't like him working for us" is a viable defense here.
But here it is so black and white on firing him this entire discussion is a bit ridiculous. The entire thing is some weird PR thing driven by the right wing.
Any company I am familiar with in the US would have fired Damore. It is also why nobody will hire him.
It is also why he now has his GF filter him.
In California, however, political affiliation is a protected class under state law.
That's not what happened here, though.
> CA is a right-to-work state, isn't it? Anyone can be laid off at any time.
You're confusing "right to work" and "at will". "Right to work" means that it's illegal for a union to prohibit non-union workers. "At will" means that employers can fire people without reason.
Even in an "at will" state, there are protected classes under both federal and state law. Political affiliation is not a protected class under federal law, but it is under California state law.
Google explicitly fired the guy for the memo. They aren't hiding as for why they fired it they explicitly gave the reason.
If you explicitly give a reason for why someone is fired, and that reason is illegal, them you will lose the court case.
Similarly, you could also find someone hiking in the woods, and just shoot them or something, and you might get away with it. Or you might not.
That's how the law works.
Google has been very clear as for why the guy was fired. Now the only question is is their stated reason equivalent to firing someone for politics. And if so, that's illegal.
This is very different in the US versus other parts of the world.
But here it is pretty easy because ANY company I am familiar with in the US would fire Damore. It is just how things work in the US. You do not write what he wrote and share it. Might not be fair but how things work.
It is also why he is sitting at home and nobody will hire him. All of this has ZERO to do with politics and him being right leaning.
The issue has been cop-opt by the right wing to use it to gen up their base.
This is NOT a political issue as it appears you think. Writing what he did about women is NOT political. It is just human decency and something you just do not do.
Why do you think he now has his GF filter what he writes?
It is illegal to prevent someone from "engaging" in politics, as per the California law I just linked you.
It is not legal to fire someone for "basically any reason" if it was for the illegal reason that I have linked.
Maybe what he did does not count as politics. You could make that argument.
But your argument about how it is possible to fire someone for any reason is untrue, as per the law.
What Damore may be trying to do is establish a legal understanding that the political discrimination (which definitely happened) was connected to racial discrimination (which would need to be proven in court). If Damore can do that successfully, he should be able to win the lawsuit.
But I don't think it's possible. At least it shouldn't be possible. Like you suggested, companies must be able to discriminate against political behavior at work that is disruptive.
Damore's memo was released in an unruly manner that disrupted Google's bottom line. It also brought down company morale, alienated fellow coworkers, and caused undue internal strife. His resulting unwillingness to help contain the drama demonstrated his lack of allegiance to the company's interest. Behavior like this cannot be protected from termination.
The person who leaked it to vox should be on the chopping block.
However, the death threats and misrepresentations of his text were not simply a factor of it being published globally. From what I have heard, the discussion was already heated inside of Google before it even got leaked.
Also, I don't think Damore was ignorant to the fact that his content was divisive in nature. I think he knew exactly what he was trying to say and knew what kind of reaction it would provoke.
I really think he needs to own it, and the lawsuit just proves the point to me why he was fired. He's not a "team player"; can't own up to his mistakes. Sure, perhaps this lawsuit will make it easier for people to discuss politics in the workplace without being fired, but his actions telegraph his intent, at least to me.
This has been about "social politics" from the beginning.
> Should I be forced to hire a neo-nazi or a terrorist sympathiser so long as they're up to the job?
Just like you should be "forced" to hire a Greenpeace member, or a union organizer, or someone outspokenly pro-choice, or someone outspokenly pro-life, or someone running on the libertarian ticket, or someone running on the Communist ticket.
How this would play out in practice if someone "brought their politics to work" and the case went to court, I can't tell you; I'm not an expert in California labor law. But if people aren't bringing their politics to work, firing people for political views would be an even more concerning precedent, to me.
(In Damore's case, the politics was very much brought to work, and not just by him. I make absolutely no claims about what that means in terms of the above-cited law, or morality, for that matter.)
The king of search finds it too hard to compile data.
http://fortune.com/2017/05/27/google-gender-wage-data-report...
Just like you aren't asked to strip search when going through TSA, `just because`. There needs to be a legitimate reason and suspicion.
TLDR: yes, and there are certain exceptions, IANAL so not sure where this particular case falls
"However, there are exceptions. For instance, if you participate in a political activity that creates a conflict of interest with your employer's business model, your job could potentially be on the line"
The whole thing here emphasis mine: No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy:
(a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office.
(b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.
It seems that Google has to have a specific policy in place for this law to be triggered, which does not seem to be the claim being made.
No. It would be enough for there to be a demonstrated consistent set of actions in a specific direction. Otherwise, many other laws could be made moot by companies not having a specific written policy, but still carrying out such actions.
It's not super clear to me that this would protect Damore, but IANAL.
PS. Being told that "You are only here because you're a diversity hire, you can't actually do the work," is creating a hostile working environment.
Read the memo before telling people what it said...
Twitter has eroded out society.
Being fired from Google has been traumatizing. He's gone farther and farther into the "unrecoverable from a PR standpoint" zone, and that's really horrible. 10 years from now, he's going to have a hard time finding employment or basic living possible. He's still a human though. If he committed himself to being humble and actually trying to work on himself, it would be really positive. Even the PR thing can go away -- everyone loves a redemption story.
The problem is that moves like this just deepen the hole. A lot of people are cheering for his demise, and seeing that hole get bigger is eye candy. But again, he's still a human. He still has hopes, dreams, fears, etc., just like the rest of us. Maybe positive encouragement to change is a better route to go than just watching him keep digging. In no way do I support his ideas -- quite the opposite -- but is it fair to characterize someone as fully a lost cause this early?
I just feel like this is a wishful thinking on the part of left. There are plenty of fields which do not care about his opinions. There are plenty of technological ventures who explicitly look to hire people who are 'uncucked' (term a recruiter used when reaching out to me) run by people HN and left in general absolutely hates (Occulus guy, Pharma bro, Peter Thiel). Plus the job of technology is such that as long as you're writing code, and pay taxes, you can make a decent living.
Not to mention the numerous developers blockchain industry hires, nearly nobody there cares about it, because majority of them are located outside US.
The technological right has money, and not everyone in technology needs to maintain an image like Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft etc.
Given today's tight labor market, he has plenty of options. If he was good enough to get into Google, at the bare minimum he could do fine in corporate IT. In a lot of red states, his past might even be an asset. If he's willing to keep his head down and feign contrition, he could probably work just about anywhere except the top tech companies.
Saw an interview with him and saying he needed to have his GF filter what he writes. I was thinking no that is not the issue. Instead do not share these things if they are in your head. Swear him saying that just made it worse. He clearly still does not get it.
BTW, the fact that a former Google engineer is sitting at home unemployed would suggest he did do something wrong.
It is also why Damore is at home unemployed. Nobody would hire him.
I think part of the confusion on this matter is employment is very different in the US versus many other parts of the world.
In the US and CA you can be fired for farting in a meeting.
1. The memo being leaked.
2. After being leaked, misrepresentations and even outright falsehoods about the memo being promulgated online.
Remember, the memo was being circulated within google for a month before his firing. This suggests that Google did not see the need to take punitive action against Damore due to the memo, but rather that it was the reception of the memo by the media that made Google fire him. Anecdotally speaking, most of the people I've encountered that read the full memo (as opposed to articles about the memo) think it wasn't worthy of firing.
Damore was fired because he was bad for business. Not because he's white, male, conservative, or the contents of his memo. Had the memo not been leaked publicly, I have no doubt he'd still be working at Google and his memo ignored and/or forgotten. He simply became too much of lightning rod for Google to continue to employ him.
Google will settle for the same reason. It is better for business to pay him off and make sure he never talks about it again, than to drag this out.
The only people who will be financially better off in this whole deal will be the lawyers, and nothing will be resolved in reference to the larger issues surrounding this case.
Is this just a reminder to be careful what you post at work?
link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...
Abstract Utilizing MRI and cognitive tests data from the Human Connectome project (N = 900), sex differences in general intelligence (g) and molar brain characteristics were examined. Total brain volume, cortical surface area, and white and gray matter correlated 0.1–0.3 with g for both sexes, whereas cortical thickness and gray/white matter ratio showed less consistent associations with g. Males displayed higher scores on most of the brain characteristics, even after correcting for body size, and also scored approximately one fourth of a standard deviation higher on g. Mediation analyses and the Method of Correlated Vectors both indicated that the sex difference in g is mediated by general brain characteristics. Selecting a subsample of males and females who were matched on g further suggest that larger brains, on average, lead to higher g, whereas similar levels of g do not necessarily imply equal brain sizes.
Highlights • Sex differences in brain morphology and general intelligence were examined.
• MRI and test data of the Human connectome project were used (N = 896)
• Males and females differed in total brain size, gray, and white matter volumes
• The male-female difference in general intelligence, g, was d = 0.25.
• Sex differences in brain morphology mediated the sex difference in g.
All these studies that show that men are naturally more intelligent because their brains are larger amount to the same thing, but racism is out of vogue, so let's use it to justify pre-existing sexism this time.
If 3 women published a scientific paper with the conclusion, "girls rule, boys drool," you wouldn't feel at least a little suspicious of the authors' intentions?
and also the idea is not to justify sexism, but to provide another possible reason for why a trend seems to perssist after apparent bias is eliminated. This is in response to the idea that oppression is somehow responsible for 100% of the gender-ratio gap.
I don't claim that biological reasons are the only reasons but I stress that they do in fact exist and that a violent response to suggesting that they might exist is not normal.
To use this studies to be sexist, is the wrong idea ,as the memo's author explained, because there is overlap between the populations and while on average one is better (in that respective function) then the other, that does not preclude that someone from the second group is better then someone one the first.
In other words, the result on hiring based on merit alone is better then both: - hiring only males - hiring based on prescribed gender quotas.
and by the way, there is studies that indicate that woman are better at empathy ( a sign of emotional intelligence): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19476221
The idea that the tech industry needs to change their approach to incentivizing women to the workplace still stands regardless.
Is that really illegal? If someone was not hired on account of his being a White supremacist, would he have any basis for a lawsuit?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
To anyone assuming that I'm opposed to such a law: you're wrong. I've written in favor of such laws in the past, and think they should be strengthened even further. Assuming of course that they are used to protect all political opinions, both left wing and right.
No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt
to coerce or influence his employees through or
by means of threat of discharge or loss of
employment to adopt or follow or refrain from
adopting or following any particular course or
line of political action or political activity.
However, I don't think Google did what you have pasted here. As far as I can tell, they fired him for violating code of conduct, which maintains that employees do not publicize discriminating memos, which he did.
However, code of conduct at Google basically doesn't want employees marginalizing other employees. That is what Damore did.
Discriminating against someone for their political beliefs is not illegal. Federally political affiliation is not a protected group and in California apparently 'political affiliation' is according to wikipedia[1] however I couldn't find the relevant section of the CA statute on the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) of CA[2].
If he was discriminated against because of his race or gender, then that is a problem. But firing him for having conservative views should be entirely valid. I am not saying that believe firms SHOULD fire people who have X view or Y view so much as they should have the right to.
While we can debate the merits of James' individual views, let's take a more extreme example. If an individual regularly spouted off white supremacist and neo-NAZI views, I don't think any of us would have a problem with a firm firing that co-worker. Firms are trying to create a culture that aligns with their objectives and enhances employee/workplace happiness and harmony. Some views are antithetical to that.
Furthermore, we can back away from such extreme views and still find cases where it would be legitimate to make decisions based on individual's views and perspectives. If you owned a company focused on selling sustainably sourced, carbon neutral products. Hiring a sales person who does not believe in climate change and is actively hostile the the concept of environmentalism would be a bad idea. It is entirely logical to hire/fire people based on non-religious beliefs.
Beliefs are choices individuals make, and thus they should be judged by their choices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160909163923/http://www.dfeh.c...
In Cali it is. These laws were enacted in the 30/40s when people were blacklisted for being Commies.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
It would be interesting if this goes to the supreme court and the conservative court rules these laws unconstitutional on freedom of association grounds.
He openly published a memo condemning his employer, tarnishing the brand and bringing the company under considerable negative press. I figure there must be some clause in any employment agreement stating that you can't actively cause damage to the company.
Edit: Looks like the memo wasn't intentionally released to the public, but it still caused damage. If I drop tables unintentionally on production, I'm not surprised if I'm fired- even if it was an accident.
False. He published a memo internally for other Google employees in a culture of internal openness and intellectual discussion which had been implied to exist inside the company for a while.
His memo was then leaked outside the company, possibly by an ideological enemy. Hard to say he was "actively causing damage to the company".
This will probably come up.
https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/06/can-you-be...
He did not write a piece of software, he wrote a piece of rhetoric which had very little to do with reality and had a lot to do with making people dislike Google and its policies.
I also write a lot of rhetoric designed to do that. The difference is I'm not a Google employee. Were I, I would fully expect to be fired, regardless of what I did with that writing (except perhaps leave it unreleased on my home computer, or write it to /dev/null).
The person in question is talking about what they presented at a meeting, but I don't think it should be interpreted that the booing actually occurred during the meeting itself. In any case, it's not really the best look, but the suit is mischaracterizing it IMO.
In USA, discrimination due to sex is illegal.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Discrimination is not just about hiring but also about workplace comfort. And let me tell you, being a non-democrat at google is NOT comfortable! VERY not comfortable!
Would they? Do you work in Silicon Valley, and if so how many Republican members did you meet on the teams you worked on. In 6+ years of work, my count is exactly 1.
[1] I'm really not sure, I'm not kidding that I'm interested in how this plays out.
The third cause of action of the filing is literally "workplace discrimination due to gender and/or race in violation of FEHA".
He is alleging three separate basic things (it's really a triple-class action; there are three separate classes that the case seeks to represent)
(1) Violation of California's law against employer control/coercion of employee political activity.
(2) race discrimination,
(3) sex discrimination.
(There's other charges, but they are basically derivative of those.)
Also, my understanding of how discrimination laws work is that the question of 'protected class' doesn't come into it - if the discrimination was based on race or gender, it's illegal.
Cause really, that's all it should take. "He made his continued employment here impossible because he pissed off his coworkers". Sounds like a completely valid reason to fire me.
You don't there are women at Google who say this memo as yet another attack on the idea that they are just as capable as their male counterparts?
sounds a bit more valid to me.
That line of stoic reasoning really justifies anything though. Like, my co-workers should manage their anxiety just because I like to work with a firearm strapped to my chest and 2 grenades on my desk.
But I think you can see that too. If you assume his ideas are correct:
1. His letter becomes well received, my employer changes their hiring policies
2. The current gender ratio was propped by non-gender-neutral hiring practices, without them, that will change back in-line to the base rate
3. My job is in danger
Is anxiety over losing one's job justified?
Or, another line:
1. His letter is well received, but my employer doesn't change their hiring policies
2. My co-workers now think that I have my job not because I earned it but because of the non-gender-neutral hiring practices
3. My job is in danger
I can produce more, but at the end of the day they all threaten either status or jobs, so I don't fault why people would defend their interests with all their effort.
Edit: Besides, those same arguments apply against the diversity advocates. They openly claim that white men dominate the industry because of sexism, that they don't hold their positions because of merit but because of bias. They're guilty of the same crime they accuse Damore of committing.
Also, calling it "citing peer-reviewed research" is sort of missing the point. How about "politely and scientifically insinuating that some of my co-workers wouldn't be working here if it weren't for social programs at the company" which can be taken for insult. The validity of the research is besides the point.
So no, Damore is not responsible for people not "managing their emotions", he's responsible for not forseeing that people would not "manage their emotions". As in, he should have known better than to insult people at work.
Going back to guns, some people like to make demonstrations where they open cary in a Starbucks. They mean no harm, they're within the bounds of the law... but they're either counting on people to freak out to create media commotion or they're obtuse.
The author did no such thing - at least not without the caveat that their rejection would have been a false negative, which negates any implications about these co-workers abilities. And taking steps to reduce the false negative rate for diverse candidates is a pretty standard practice in bay area, see this past comment of mine for an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953762
Other commenters have chimed in saying Google has similar policies, and the company openly states on their careers page that they're an affirmative action employer. If making a factually correct statement about the company's hiring practices is an insult, then it'd be prudent to rethink those practices.
I'm aware this line of thinking is like "blaming the victim" for non-neurotypical people who don't know where the line is. It's not a great situation all around.
Update: one moment this gets up voted and the next moment it gets down voted and this repeats, is anybody willing to actually argue? Call my bs, I have thick skin.
There are people that might generalize and think all right wing people feel this way about women.
I have right wing friends and know that is not true but others might.
Instead Damore has become some kind of right wing matre which seems really strange.
I mean we have an employee who does not work in HR and I do not think a manager working on something that has nothing to do with their job. Something people are fired for everyday.
Then on top is negative no matter how you look at it towards other employees that makes it impossible to keep and have him on a team. Double firable offence and Google would be wrong not have.
Then it is freaking California where the law is in the employer side.
But somehow it has become some weird rally call for the alt right and the abuse of white guys which I am actually am one of.
Someone should write a book. It is just insane how easily some are being manipulated. But there must be something deeper inside that makes it this easy that for some reason I am missing as a white guy.
Why do we have angry white guys? Why not me?
(and just to make sure : people should be treated just great even if they're different, meaning they have different abilities somehow, somewhere, and we don't know them all because science isn't advanced enough yet to make any kind of definitive statement).
EDIT : And for those with a great desire of flaming people in public, i suggest tracking people that :
- don't believe climate change is due to human activity
- don't believe public social security should cover every expense
- don't like electric cars, or keep driving SUVs
- have been found watching (racial) porn at the office
- have made any kind of bad joke on any minority
- have made public declaration (at the office cafetaria to his neighbor) supporting any decision by president Trump.
- has bought a gun for his home
- think Google should pay its taxes. Oh no, wait this one is still too controversial.
pretty sure we don’t want anyone watching any sort of porn at the office
A PR nightmare for him costs him very little. There are no products that customers can boycott to get back at him. No offices where he could be protested.
The 'worst' that could happen is that some tech companies refusing to hire him. But given his recent fame, I doubt he has to worry about money anymore.
Every culture is shaped by the people it's comprised of by definition. Do you have a problem with the fact that Chinese culture is "shaped by 1000 years of Chinese dominance"?