Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics.
Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power.
For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.
There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor).
James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do.
Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon.
In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority.
I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
I always thought Reddit was a better platform for people more interested in a echo chamber safe space where they can post low-effort 1-2 sentence comments and be patted on the back with other similar comments all saying the same thing.
Gee, that must be some sort of biological factor! Certainly not related to social aspects outside of signing up for a high school computer science class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans?wpro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology?...
Given that these arguments have been consistently proven wrong but always come back in a different form, the 21st-century versions should be carefully scrutinized to see if they're the same politically motivated reasoning. And we should never pretend that they're not political, however much they're cloaked in objectivity. Indeed, people who value science should especially object to political argument wrapping itself in a lab coat.
The only things that really worked was to create softer versions of degrees. Like make computer science program with a focus on UX or design, then you get a lot of women applying. You still wont get more women into the more technical roles, but at least you get more women's perspective into the industry. Also you know how so many say that communication skills is the most important part of their job as a software engineer? Why not just make a degree related to that directly? Women would flock to such programs.
Oppressors don’t exactly have a history of saying “yeah we are doing this for evil reasons.” Instead they hide behind bogus arguments to justify why their behavior is actually good for those they harm.
“We should change how we hire women because of structural differences between men and women” is not only a political statement but one that comes with centuries of baggage attached.
Please tell me which of Damore's recommendations amounted to opression. I see "we can make software engineering more people-oriented" and "allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive". Nowhere do I see anything even remotely comparable to Nazi treatment of jews or denying women the right to vote. In fact his suggestions attempt to improve the workplace satisfaction of women.
If you look at how we hire women today, it's clear that your quote accurately describes current reality. Men and women are attracted and hired differently today. If you disagree with this, you are choosing to ignore the biases every human possesses.
With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.
Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics.
Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions.
That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces.
> “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky
I don't understand how that statement discredits anything I said.
Politics is peoples' opinions and is subjective/normative (eg. things "ought" to be this way). Science attempts to explain how nature works (eg. this is why things are this way), and is objective. That memo was not political.
> how things “ought” to be
Those are the same thing.
> Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political
Yes if his memo was a paragraph saying "We should change our gender policy to X, Y, and Z", then yes it would be political.
Instead it is a 10 page document explaining how biological differences may explain gender imbalances, and the implications of this.
But sure if you want to dismiss it as "politics", then I guess there's no reasoning with you.
You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. Whether or not that was his original intent doesn’t really matter, the interpretation of his post was both predictable and understandable. He should’ve seen that coming, and to argue that he was just apolitically interested in the science of gender is disingenuous.
The memo certainly challenged Google's corporate policy. So what? You think anyone who has an opposing view on a corporate policy and can back their view up with facts and evidence should be fired?
Personally I'm not big on authoritarianism/totalitarianism, but maybe that's just me.
All I’m saying is that arguing about policy is politics. That’s it.
Discussions about how society ought to be tend to be vague and aspirational: “society ought to be more just” is more vague than “we should spend more money on these programs”. The latter might serve the former, but it’s also specific and actionable, which is why I draw the distinction where I do.
Also, if Congress weighs in on something, isn’t it de-facto political?
As with the SRE who tried to play epidemiologist the other day it pays to be skeptical about the evidence and opinions presented even if they are delivered with citations and in an academic tone. Especially when both are playing far outside their fields of expertise.
I haven't seen a single comment in this post disagreeing with the memo that actually critiques any specific points in the memo. Every single criticism I've seen is more along the lines of "but he was being sexist". Ok, can't argue with that I guess.
I realize asking you to debunk the whole memo may be a bit much, so can you just point to the single most consequential unscientific part of it?
I read the memo and was horrified by how badly people treated him because of it. To me it seems like a rational and well evidenced document.
IMO, that kind of discussion is frankly uninteresting and unhelpful.
A paper on neuroticism in older women compared to older men - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2031866/
"testing gender differences at the level of latent traits revealed higher levels of Neuroticism (d = .52) and Agreeableness (d = .35) in older women than older men. The consistency of these findings with prior work in younger samples attests to the stability of gender differentiation on Neuroticism and Agreeableness across the lifespan."
A paper trying to asses the genetic component to personality traits - http://midus.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/1779.pdf
"Research has found observed phenotypic sex differences in the BFM. Women, for instance, tend to have higher mean levels of Agreeableness and Neuroticism than men (Chapman, Duberstein, Sörensen, & Lyness, 2007; Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001; Feingold, 1994)."
A paper looking at personality trait differences across the world and in other cultures - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12265
"In terms of the personality traits known as the Big Five, men tend to score lower than women in neuroticism and agreeableness"
A paper looking at gender differences in neuroticism and extraversion across 30 different countries - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14018323_Gender_Dif...
"Women obtained higher means than men on neuroticism in all countries, and men obtained higher means than women on psychoticism in 34 countries and on extraversion in 30 countries."
A paper on neuroticism differences in men and women among college students - http://mpsi.umm.ac.id/files/file/723%20-%20728%20Djudiyah%20...
"Table 1 showed that there was significant difference of neuroticism level between males and females (t-test = 2.138, df =49, P<0.05). Males tended to have lower neuroticism personality level (Mean=111,833) than females (Mean=127.303). Thus the hypothesis that males have less neuroticism level than females was accepted."
I could go on for a long time just finding different studies on this topic and quoting their results, but there is no need to. That women have higher rates of neuroticism is likely the least debatable and most scientific thing Damore asserted. Can you find a single study or paper where it was concluded that women had anything but higher levels of neuroticism?
I trust that you will either have one or more such references, or you will admit that this claim is scientific and not really debatable. If you admit that, I would expect some revision of your general opinion given that this is an example of one of what you believed to be one of the more significant things Damore got wrong.
Additionally, dealing with discrimination can lead to self-esteem issues, which are tied to neuroticism.
When thinking about this you should ask what your priors are. If neuroticism is widely, across ages and cultures, found to be higher in women and men, and it is, then wouldn't your prior, without a Google specific personality survey, be that Google women likely have higher neuroticism than men?
To me it seems like an impossibly high standard to expect Damore to do a personality survey of Google to figure out if this oft repeated neuroticism result also holds true for Google employees.
Keep in mind that Damore is a single person giving feedback to a diversity course. He doesn't have the resources, time, or mandate to survey Google's employees to test whether or not this general trend holds. Perhaps, before acting on Damore's recommendations it would be a good idea to do some tests on Google's employees to see if general trends hold true in their specific subset - but that is a really different claim than the initial claim that Damore was unscientific.
If Damore had written that smoking causes lung problems and therefore Google should start taking some actions to stop employees from smoking, it might be merited to do further tests to see if the link between smoking and lung problems holds true for Google employees as it does for people in general. It would not be merited to call Damore unscientific because he had not yet done that research prior to making his suggestion.
Do you find this statement offensive? Should I not say this because it might hurt men's feelings?
Or is it only wrong to say something negative about a race/gender if it implies something negative about certain underrepresented genders and races?
>Neuroticism is one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness.[1] People who are neurotic respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening and minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. They are often self-conscious and shy, and they may have trouble controlling urges and delaying gratification.
Is there truly a common thread between these various emotions that ties them all together as neuroticism, or is neuroticism an arbitrarily chosen set of emotions? It's far from clear to me that these listed emotions have much to do with each other in the general case. If I'm feeling fear or worry because the sidewalk I'm walking on is covered in ice, that's not related in any way to anger or envy. Does it only count when these emotions are irrational? What then does it mean for these emotions to be irrational? If I am alone and feel lonely, is that irrational? Is loneliness only indicative of neuroticism when you're actually surrounded by your friends? Maybe you'd feel lonely in such a situation because none of your friends can related to you about something you've been worrying about. Is there any truly objective measure of the rationality of an emotion? I don't think so.
Wikipedia goes on to say that there's a lot of disagreement over what this term means:
> Neuroticism is a trait in many models within personality theory, but there is a lot of disagreement on its definition. Some define it as a tendency for quick arousal when stimulated and slow relaxation from arousal, especially in concern to negative emotional arousal; others define it as emotional instability and negativity or maladjustment, in contrast to emotional stability and positivity, or good adjustment. Others yet define it as lack of self-control, poor ability to manage psychological stress, and a tendency to complain.[6]
It says that 'personality theory' is a scientific study, but I'm a bit skeptical of that.
Yes. It's something that shows up in one specific factor analysis as one of five dimensions (i.e. parameters) that effectively summarize your answers to a bunch of questions about personality. Different analyses/models come up with different parameterizations, e.g. the HEXACO model has six parameters, with the Emotionality factor picking up the bulk of "Neuroticism" from the Big 5, but some ending up under Honesty-Humility (reversed) or even under Agreeableness (reversed)!
Suppose for example a woman lives in an environment that's dangerous for her but not so for men. On the questionnaire, she reports that she often feels afraid. Is that answer considered evidence of neuroticism? It seems to me that it shouldn't be, but you'd need to examine the individual circumstances on a case-by-case basis to tease out the difference between rational fear and neurotic fear. From a logistics standpoint I don't see how that analysis could be done at scale, hence my skepticism that any of this is actually scientific.
The problem is when you synthesize ideas from research without expertise. The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document.
“It has citations” is not a valid reason to consider something well argued and scientific. Even flat earthers include citations.
A recurring pattern in this debate is that people criticize Damore for a lack of expertise. Which is odd given that Damore, a Harvard Masters Degree holder in Systems Biology, is clearly conversant with the research and the context he is giving advice in. Furthermore, I have yet to see anyone point out a substantive specific error that Damore made, its just general things like "he lacks expertise."
Tell me, what is the most obvious or least controversial example of Damore's lack of expertise in terms of his argument?
Oh boy. I've got a PhD in CS from one of the best programs in the world. I'm wildly unqualified to synthesize research in another field and would surely make terrible errors if I tried to connect the dots between citations, especially if I started with my connections and went looking for associated citations. Having a familiarity with research is absolutely not evidence that his conclusions will be strongly considered.
This discussion has been had a thousand times. People he cited have responded to his writing. There can be no productive discussion about "were his conclusions correct or not" at this point.
You think the authors Damore cited rejected him. Perhaps you have an example of that. I haven't seen anything beyond the authors agreeing with Damore's interpretation of the facts and saying they don't know about the conclusions. It's obviously not very compelling given that Damore was metaphorically tarred on feathered on social media and fired, so researchers saying they "don't know" about the conclusions might be because they genuinely don't know or might be because they don't want to invite backlash of their own.
I cannot personally derive a conclusion about Damore from the literature. What I can do is ask world experts about their thoughts. In general, this is an effective way of developing reasonable opinions about the state of research. I'm friends with a few social psych faculty who study workplaces and let's just say that they don't hold Damore in high regard.
I'm super uninterested in having an argument about the merits of his essay since that discussion has been had thousands of times and no progress can be made. But "well he has a master's degree from harvard" is among the least compelling arguments in his favor.
If world experts have weighed in on Damore, link to their opinions. I'm happy to discuss those.
Right, so you personally disagree with his conclusions, thus it must be "problematic".
Unless you're going to elaborate as to what specifically you find problematic, there's not really much to discuss here and this is a pretty useless discussion.
For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things.
There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified.
EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.
Reasoned ideology has long ago left the room.
This goes for both tribes, of course. With some exceptions on both sides.
The left is nuclear power and biology denial.
Overlap on antivax.
Welcome to being hated by both sides of you actually use science to form your opinions, rather than justify preconceived beliefs.
So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.
They could dynamically band together on a per-issue basis and have more reasoned discussions focusing on those issues instead of making sure to pronounce “shibboleth” correctly.
Democrats is just as extreme. You have the science part of Democrats who vote for them since Republicans largely rejects science for religious reasons (see evolution etc). Then you have the identity politics part of the Democrats. I am 100% certain that a majority of software engineers doesn't agree with the identity politics parts of the Democrats platform, yet they still vote Democrats since they at least doesn't have the religious fanatics on their side which are even worse.
In countries where you can vote right wing without voting for science denial software engineers tend to vote right wing since it gets them lower taxes. Left wing parties are mostly for people with less money.
Rather than the old paradigm where political left == liberalism, I think there needs to be a distinction between the new progressive left and classical liberalism since both hold some views and philosophies that are incompatible with each other.
It may well be that, like me, it is not you that has changed necessarily but more that what is considered the left nowadays has drifted away from old school liberalism and you find yourself as alienated by progressives as you are by conservatives?
Liberalism doesn't, and has never, meant "left-wing" except for in America.
It feels like in many circles the most accurate word would be “heretic”. (and the same is true in many conservative circles - if you don’t hold the right beliefs in the right way you are a “liberal” - in this context, meaning “heretic”). It’s fucking exhausting to get into politics with anyone at all because it’s all just witch hunts and inquisitions.
It really doesn't matter how much evidence backs his view or not. It doesn't matter how much logic he mustered or didn't.