With all the outrage from women in Silicon Valley (I.e. walkouts) I’d be uncomfortable as well. If you inadvertently offend a women and they complain, you are more likely to get fired, no questions asked.
(Later apparently, the woman was also fired)
The guy posted on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681
Worse, that episode is a classic flamewar topic which ought not to be tossed into like a Molotov cocktail into some other inflammatory thread. The only effect will be to send the whole thing up in flames. This is the kind of thing that site guideline is written for.
I don't necessarily condone Damore's action (or Google's reaction, for that matter) but I'm incredulous that someone could suggest this is not accurate (well, except for the fact that it wasn't an individual woman). I'm interested to hear why you think this is inaccurate.
I also feel it's absurd to characterize it as flamebait. It's directly relevant to the question under discussion - why gender issues are making men feel uncomfortable in the workplace. That doesn't mean their discomfort is justified - maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But flagging these comments indicates you feel that noone is even *allowed to discuss it openly.
That's a big difference! As I said, we all need to take greater care about facts than that. Bringing in a classic flamewar topic, when it isn't strictly relevant, is like dropping a bomb in the thread. The site guidelines ask people particularly not to do that.
Generic flamewar topics are black holes that suck everything in, especially anything that drifts nearby. They need to be consciously resisted if we are not to rehearse the same flamewars over and over. Some people may want to do that, but it's off topic for Hacker News.
> It's directly relevant to the question under discussion
I don't agree. Perhaps it feels that way because "gender" plus "controversy", but the actual topic of this thread is distinct and remote from that. We need to make finer-grained, more precise distinctions, if we want to avoid a big fireball.
I disagree, however, that it was a mischaracterization of, or irrelevant to, the specific comment I was responding to.
For example, you say: "You need to treat people as individuals"
Damore agrees with you. He said:
"I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism)."
and
"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."
You say:
I think he got fired because he called the entire category of female employees generally poor performers
But Damore said:
"Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.”
So he said the opposite of "the entire category", he explicitly said he was talking about statistical observations that aren't true in many cases.
He also had some not terribly pleasant truths to drop about men:
"This may lead to more male CEOs and geniuses, but also more homeless males and school dropouts. This has likely evolved because individual males can have many children and are biologically disposable."
But nobody seems to remember that.
Doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with the firing, but that was unquestionably the reason.