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Comment by jlebar | Hacker News Reader

Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.

What percentage of people publicly criticizing the memo and attacking Damore do you think actually read it in full?

Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.

How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?

I'll also suggest, reading this memo was incredibly painful for many of my female colleagues and friends inside and outside of Google. I don't think they should have to read the entire thing carefully in order to have an opinion on it. Indeed, I am not a well-read expert in many schools of thought that I nonetheless object to.

> Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.

OP's claim was that this was intentional with the goal of creating sensational clickbait. I guess the idea is, the full memo was tamer and, had it not been excerpted, people would not have reacted as strongly.

Do you agree with this?

Yes of course if it had not been excerpted and retitled as "Anti-diversity memo", people would have been less primed to have a knee jerk reaction, or to even click the link in the first place.

>How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?

Because you can't begin to know what someone meant unless you read what they wrote.

OK, if I'm understanding this right, the argument is that because the document was not initially printed in full (i.e. with figures and citations) in the press (and had inflammatory headlines), many people got the wrong impression about it.

That seems like a testable hypothesis.

1. If it were true, I'd expect a significantly higher proportion of Googlers to be on his side than the proportion non-Googlers, since all Googlers had access to the full memo. Is that true?

2. If it were true, I'd expect a significant number of people who ended up reading the whole memo to say, I initially had a negative reaction, but after seeing X specific figure or citation, I changed my mind. Has anyone in this thread said that? If not, why not?

(Is your feeling that first impressions are everything, and after that, people's views are ossified past the point of being able to change?)

Probably as high a percentage as his supporters. Trying to deflect criticism by saying people hadn’t read it was a common way to avoid critically thinking about it, and it became comical when people were making very specific comments which clearly indicated familiarity. I remember someone writing a very detailed critique of the way it was oversold it as based on science despite misrepresenting the scientific consensus[1], and even then you could easily find people saying that the reason she didn’t agree with him was that she hadn’t read it or that buzzfeed published the text first without charts, even when she was discussing the original studies he was claiming as support.

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...

The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.

And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?

Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?)

For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.

Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan.

I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did.

Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?

Yes, it would. I'm not sure what you think you're arguing against - all I said was that Gizmodo stripped out the citations from Damore's memo.

As for Yonatan, if you don't believe he's a deranged lunatic go read the insane diatribes he was posting in 2017 about how Trump is literally Hitler and that Muslims and Latinos needed to flee the country as soon as possible for their own safety. The man is detached from reality. It disturbs me that someone so psychotic was able to occupy a senior position at Google.

The memo was, but very few people read that and instead read what was spoon fed to them by their ideological rag of choice. Look how many comments on this HN post alone claim he said things he didn’t (the google women engineers were worse, women can’t code, all women are neurotic, etc).

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