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Comment by devalgo | Hacker News Reader

Stefan Molyneux is a pig but your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong. If you read the memo it is a relatively straightforward review of standard Biology and Psychology research. There's virtually nothing controversial in it. If you have issues with it you have issues with science. Which given the "decolonize" science lunacy recently isn't surprising. China is laughing all the way to the bank as both sides of the political divide in the West largely and the US specifically abandon logic and reason for superstition and dogma.

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"your characterization of Damore is low effort and more or less completely wrong".

Your characterization of Damore is equally low effort. The memo is not simply a "relatively straightfoward review of standard Biology and Psychology research". Even if I were to agree that those parts of it were non-controversial, those parts of it are not the point or intention of the memo.

You are completely ignoring the arguments Damore actually makes, that were built on faulty premises and selected studies that validate his worldview. Some of his statements might be non-controversial in isolation, but have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion. You are also completely ignoring the context in which this memo was distributed, surfaced, and the channels through which it was ultimately publicized.

Damore clearly had an agenda and his own bias against what he perceived as PC-culture at Google. Trying to frame him as some neutral observer of the behavioral psychology of Googlers is ignorant, if not disingenuous.

>have been constructed to build a specific narrative about diversity and inclusion

Just for reference, the first line in the memo is literally: "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes"

But you kapnobatairza, you actually know what was in Damore's heart better than he himself. You are an oracle and a prophet and the bringer of truth. 2+2=5 amirite.

Nice strawman you've built there. Enjoy beating it up.

Damore's evidence was by turns cherry picked, misinterpreted, and unrepresentative of mainstream understanding in the fields it came from. You can read plenty of those researchers complaining about his use of their work. His synthesis is about as scientific as phrenology.

>articles that were both cherry picked and misinterpreted

Which ones?

Your edit is even more misleading and incoherent than your original comment.

Just for fun let's try a few:

Memo line: "Women, on average, have more Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men"

Research summary: "I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective d s = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men). In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1751-9004...

Wow.. totally misrepresented the research there...

Memo: "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average"

Research: "There are no sex differences in cognitive ability but enduring sex differences in competitiveness, life goals, the relative emphasis on agency versus "connection." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0306988060076911...

Omg how misogynistic...

Memo: "Women, on average, have more Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)."

Research: "Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality inventory data from 26 cultures (N =23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas" https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.81.2....

Omg he totally misrepresented the research there...

> If you have issues with it you have issues with science.

Dogmatic statements like these just weaken your case; the idea that some memo was the Golden Standard™ of Science and those who question it are questioning Science itself is clearly ridiculous. It's Trump-level hyporbole. The perfect memo.

Care to point out which lines in the Memo were weren't supported by standard literature?

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