So yeah, on balance, and taken as a whole it is a pretty balanced, tepid, and cautiously phrased document. To call it “lashing out” is almost laughably uncharitable, and indicates you’re letting your own biases and preconceptions stop you from reading the memo fairly.
Also, it’s unfair to say he “pretended” his argument was rooted in biology. The fact is there is persuasive evidence to be made in favour of his position. Not saying he’s right, but there’s enough evidence supporting his argument to convince an honest person without imputing bad motives to him.
Finally, given the anaphylactic reaction to his memo, it’s more than a little silly to pretend Google culture isn’t hostile to certain conservative opinions. Ironically, many of the quotes you cherry picked were largely borne out by the exceptionally angry reaction of many of his fellow employees.
This spin is drastically toning down the Chicken-Little nature of Damore’s portentous warnings about Google’s alleged “veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google” and “The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology” and “Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs” and “the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment”, etc.
Along with his attacks on Google’s policies, Damore was parrotting a lot of boilerplate “libertarian” anti-liberalism, and Google did not want to be associated with that in the public mind. I don’t see a way in which that’s intrinsically “anti-conservative”, unless you’re acknowledging that there’s something “conservative” about slinging around poorly supported gripes about “political correctness” based on popular misinterpretations of science.
You seem to have the concept of “critics” a bit mixed up here. If there are two opposite positions A and B, and one person asserts “A” and his critics point out “Actually that assertion is drastically overstating the certainty of the science on A and B”, that’s not the same thing as his critics asserting “B”. In other words, you’re somewhat overstating the “bothsidesism” of this situation.
If I understand, the debate here is that tech companies are biased against certain conservative positions. Not low taxes for corporations and billionaires, not no regulations, not unlimited donations to PACs, but biased against white supremacy, misogyny, and homophobia?
“My employer’s policies are dangerous bullshit, although my employer means well, and the problems my employer’s dangerous-bullshit policies are shortsightedly intended to address aren’t totally imaginary” is not really a “tepid” or “cautiously phrased” assessment, even “taken as a whole”.
Well, in the sense that ignorance rather than pretense could be the explanation, yes. But there is no intelligently informed justification for the overall argument he was trying to make.
Google HR, and pro-diversity HR policies generally, are saying “There are a lot of persistent effects of historical discrimination, so we are going to try to counter those by encouraging diversity and trying to overcome ingrained societal bias”. Damore was saying “Maybe that stuff is mostly biological, for this and that cherry-picked reason, and more importantly it makes anti-liberal people feel silenced, so the policies are bad and should be changed”. That argument is not supported by scientific evidence.
Nope. There’s definitely persuasive evidence in favor of the position that all contributing factors to gender/racial differences in cultural expectations and social phenomena need to be studied more deeply, but there is no valid evidence to justify Damore’s sweeping assertions about diversity policies being counterproductive overall. His argument depends fundamentally on ideology and resentment rather than evidence.
Are we talking about “employee culture” here, or official company positions? This thread is about whether “tech companies are biased against conservatives”, so I thought it was referring to actual company policy. I have no quarrel with the suggestion that a lot of Google’s individual employees may well hold anti-conservative beliefs.
My point was that if they noticed that the algorithms were unfairly targeting some group, they could bring it up with their management. As you noted, developers don’t set policy.
I haven’t studied TOS in detail. What I’ve seen of them seems to be designed to be uncontroversial, and are only now controversial because of the extremism of some groups.
Have a source for this? The closest thing I can find is a headline saying that 1/3 of Chinese immigrants to Vancouver return.
All those I know seem to fit quite well into their home country, returning for conferences or for family visits.
China is now heavily recruiting people to return, which is not surprising. I know of some who have returned for a new job. There are also quite a few tech companies with offices in India who encourage immigrant employees to move there. I know of quite a few who did this.
Sure some return, but that has always been the case. Irving Howe, in “World of Our Fathers” talks about the Jews who went back to Eastern Europe from New York. My great grandfather did with his youngest daughter sometime in the 1910s.
There might be some more who are forced to return when their visas run out. I’m not sure that should count, as it is involuntary. And there are those who overstay their visas.
And it does not contradict what I found, in reality most do remain in the USA and they are not amused with the virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Republicans nowadays.
For an H-1B worker to get a green card, their employer has to file a Form I-140 on their behalf. This will be either an EB-1, EB-2, or EB-3 preference request. The country breakout for that is on page 12:
The number of H-1B visas for initial employment issued are 67,815 for India and 15,165 for China. However, it should be noted that these numbers don’t include children, marital partners, etc. as you’ll note by the under 20 count on page 9 of the document. Based on personal experience and the breakout for unemployed people given in the statistics of lawful permanent resident statistics (Profiles on Lawful Permanent Residents: 2017 Country | Homeland Security) I think it’s likely that the total number of people who come to the US on an H-1B visa is about double the number of H-1B visas that are issued, because of people bringing over their spouse and children. I would expect that there are about 130,000 Indians in the US via H-1B and about 30,000 Chinese.
Overall, I would say that about 26% of people attempt to convert from H-1B to a lawful permanent resident.
Though, “attempt” is a meaningful word:
The numbers are too inconsistent, year to year, to guess what percentage of people will be denied in any given year, but 20-50% rejection is fairly possible. If we assume a 35% rejection rate, then we only expect about 17% of H-1B workers to actually succeed at becoming a lawful permanent resident.
I’ve seen these accusations, but no examples that weren’t violations of their content policies. Those who use these platforms agreed to those policies.
Also, I’ve yet to run into any accusation of Twitter shadowbanning that actually involved, well, shadowbanning. The “victim” will still have an account, and their supposedly blocked tweet will be clearly visible. When Twitter bans, there is nothing secret about it.
Ah, but see that’s how sneaky shadowbanning is ! You’re still on Twitter, and your posts are still 100% public, but you just *feel *banned. And you can’t prove to anyone that you are, you just know it. Talk about gaslighting on Twitter’s part !
How else can you explain it? Your independent brilliance shines forth with every link to YouTube, every retweeted meme, every insight that you post. And yet your likeless and downvoted posts are relegated to the bottom of everyone’s feed. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.
They don’t ban people for being conservatives. They do ban people for being assholes. It is hardly the fault of the tech companies that there’s such a high overlap these days. Add to that the number of folks on the right who intentionally act like assholes so that they’ll be banned and then can feed the rightie meme that tech companies are biased against conservatives.
I tend to think that they demonstrate a bias against conservatives, sometimes deliberately sometimes not. I think that that is obviously true. I don’t care enough and it’s not important enough to me that I need to prove it to myself or anybody else. So, no. I won’t be providing cites or evidence. Deliberate or not, these are private platforms, and I believe they should be free to discriminate as they see fit.
I think it is stupid to do so.
I want to know what everybody is thinking. I want everybody to have a voice. Nazis, white supremacists, left wing radicals all should be heard. The crazier they are, the more offensive they are, the more hateful they are, the more they should be heard. It’s important to keep an eye and an ear on them, and if they are willing to help you do so, why would you want to stop them.
Also, the nutjobs and the hateful are often people with legitimate grievances or problems who are truly suffering. The results of their circumstances may have turned them to truly odious or evil viewpoints but that doesn’t mean they don’t have real problems and aren’t suffering from real issues that are worth are attention.
That is nice, but little to do with the point I made, Hindus and Chinese that stay in the USA may not show much personal involvement with politics on the surface, but when we do talk votes most naturalized Hindu and Chinese Americans are not amused with the anti-immigrant trash coming from the current Republican party.
