All of this.
The best case scenario for the people out for blood against this guy: he’s a moron who said something ignorant but thoroughly defensible. Now he’s a pariah.
What the fuck, guys. That’s not okay.
If I had to sum up my problems with the social justice movement in one sentence, this would be it. Well said.
Honestly, when it comes to gender and race, the whole biological differences argument has been forever tainted by racists who are advocating it just so they can justify their views about the inherent inferiority of non white people and women. If you actually want to discuss it seriously, I’d put the lede at the top of the ten page manifesto in bold letters. Or else just reduce it to one page before cc’ing.
If you write a 10 page manifesto about anything, soccer, coding, underwater basket weaving; and send it to your co-workers at a Very Large Company, you can expect a disciplinary action.
If that manifesto contains anything that could even remotely be interpreted as being disrespectful of your fellow employees, you will be fired.
Sorry, them’s the breaks. You don’t use company resources to distribute your opinion unless you have been asked to do so.
He posted it on an internal forum which was explicitly set up so that employees could provide anonymous comments and advice for improving company policy.
And it is no mystery to me why they fired him for it.
So you are literally saying that speech should be free, that no one should ever have to face any consequences for anything they say? I know that that is a tad strawmanish, but if you say really stupid or loathsome shit, I think society needs to have recourse. And if “destroy” means he had to live in his mother’s basement and work at the Quickstop, then so be it. His life might suck, but so do the lives of millions of other people.
What about this memo is so stupid and loathesome? I keep reading through it, trying to figure out what, exactly, about it warrants a public flogging, multiple articles in Slate and Vox decrying the “culture of sexism” at google and saying that firing Damore was a good first step, a complete destruction of this man’s career, and a former google HR rep to imply that he deserved to be punched in the face or that his coworkers would want to… and I can’t find it. To be as charitable as possible, the science he brings up is at best somewhat refuted by other studies, in the same way studies in psychology and sociology constantly get overturned and overoverturned. He brings this up to make a point about a problem he has with company policy in a respectful way, in the correct forum, anonymously, and this is the backlash?
What the fuck, guys?
And yeah, if you can go from “someone qualified to working at google” to “living in your mother’s basement as a social pariah lucky to get a job at Quizno’s” over something like this, something is horribly fucking wrong. I’m reminded of another Scott Alexander piece:
This rule of “never let anyone build a conceptual superweapon that might get used against you” seems to be the impetus behind a lot of social justice movements. For example, it’s eye-rollingly annoying whenever the Council on American - Islamic Relations condemns a news report on the latest terrorist atrocity for making too big a deal that the terrorists were Islamic (what? this bombing just killed however many people, and all you can think of to get upset about is that the newspaper mentioned the guy screamed ‘Allahu akbar’ first?), but I interpret their actions as trying to prevent the construction of a conceptual superweapon against Islam (or possibly to dismantle one that already exists). Like the Jew whose best option would have been to attack potentially anti-Jewish statements even when they were reasonable in context, CAIR can’t just trust that no one will use the anti-Muslim sentiment against non-threatening Muslims. As long as there are stupid little trivial disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims over anything at all, that giant anti-Muslim superweapon sitting in the corner is just too tempting to refuse.
This is also one reason (of at least three) why I have serious reservations about feminism.
Sometimes I read feminist blogs. A common experience is that by the end of the article I am enraged and want to make a snarky comment, so I re-read the essay to pick out the juiciest quotes to tear apart. I re-read it and I re-read it again and eventually I find that everything it says is both factually true and morally unobjectionable. They very rarely say anything silly like “And therefore all men, even the ones who aren’t actively committing this offense I’m arguing against, are evil”, and it’s usually not even particularly implied. I feel like the Jew in the story above, who admits that it’s really bad the Jewish guy killed the Christian child, and would hate to say, like a jerk, that Christians aren’t allowed to talk about it.
But like him I am uncomfortable. Like him I can’t shake the worry that they are building a conceptual superweapon that could be used against me.
Feminism is a memeplex that provides a bunch of pattern-matching opportunities where a man is in the wrong and a woman is in the right. To give a very personal example, I mentioned a few days ago how I was close friends with a woman until I asked her out and she then decided to have a fit and cut off all contact with me. Normally everyone would agree I was in the right and try to console me and maybe even her own friends would tell her she was overreacting. But thanks to feminism she has a superweapon - she can accuse me of being a Nice Guy 
and therefore Worse Than Hitler . The appropriate cliche having been conveniently provided, enough people decide to round to the nearest cliche and decide that I am in the wrong that the incident raises her status and decreases my own.
(Man, it is really hard to pick out just three paragraphs when quoting rationalist pieces, because of how dense and interconnected the writing is. Just go read the whole piece.)
To put it bluntly, this is where I see that particular superweapon being pointed dangerously close to me. And I’m not happy about that.
Hordes of shrieking zealots that ruin peoples lives is not proportionate. What is going to happen is a nasty backlash against the philosophy these zealots proclaim to follow. Do you honestly think our current political reality is in no way part of that backlash?
Or, to put it another way, here’s Business Insider, not exactly a far-right website: “Get ready for the ‘tech alt-right’ to gain power and influence in Silicon Valley”
What Damore’s termination tells you is that many in your field consider people with your beliefs to be unfit to work with. They hold opinions of you similar to those of former senior Google employee Yonatan Zunger, who wrote about Damore, saying:
[INDENT]“Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them.” (Emphasis mine.)
If you are on the right, you probably find it hard to imagine that any reasonably person could read Damore’s memo and think that it reveals the author to be sexist, punchable, or a danger to women’s careers. It appears to you that Damore was excommunicated for questioning the progressive diversity narrative in a most respectful manner.
[/INDENT]
You know that thing where someone on your side acts like an asshole, and suddenly the whole side looks worse? You can either double down and defend that asshole, or excoriate that person. We on the left, on the side of social justice, have already made the wrong choice when it comes to Damore. We look like assholes. Cut it out.
Science? There was science in that? I saw none. It looked like a massive whine to the effect that RWers (like him, it would seem) are marginalized at google and need to keep their heads down. I saw nothing in the rant other than opinion, salted lightly with some utter bullshit.
And, in his profession, the attitude and perspective expressed in the diatribe depict a person who is actually not well-suited to software development. He seems to be rather blinkered and inflexible, which are not good traits for that kind of work. If his “career” is “destroyed”, it very well may be for the best.
Though I seriously doubt this will “ruin” him. There is plenty of work in that field. If no company will hire him because of this, he will learn how to freelance, or maybe find pleasure in growing potatoes. The persecution aspect of this story is as overblown as the story itself.
I agree that firing him may have been a tad extreme, but his text is far from “neutral, fact-based, and unemotional” He says:
He does have a very prescient section in which he all but foretells his own firing
And there is one thing he absolutely gets right
Society should penalize people for their speech when appropriate, but it should be proportionate to the offense and the intent behind the offense. We don’t destroy people’s lives for real crimes, we shouldn’t be doing it for offensive statements. I’m actually surprised at how enthusiastic liberals are for the lynch mob mentality given that for most of our history it was used against them, and is still occasionally used against them(See: Dixie Chicks).
And think about the last part of your statement. A software engineer who was talented enough to work at Google should be condemned to working at the Quickstop because of his opinions on women. Yeah, let’s waste our country’s rather limited supply of talent and replace yet another American worker with a foreign import. Well, I guess he could go for an even lower position: President of the United States. No one seems to care if a President disrespects women. And that job can’t be filled by a guest worker.
This guy complained that his (not extreme) political views were marginalized, and that sharing his (reasonable, not extreme) views would lead to pushback. So he complained about that in a private anonymous forum specifically for complaints like that, and was named, nationally shamed, and fired. Is it whining if it’s both true and important?
The academic citations are missing, but it’s not that full of bullshit.
What’s blinkered and inflexible? Again, I’m not seeing it. Can you point out what gave you that impression? Like the various complaints I’ve seen at Slate, Vox, Medium, etc., I’m left with the impression that each time I open that memo, I’m somehow redirected to a completely different document. That, or a whole bunch of people are operating from the principle of anti-charity, i.e. “the governor must hate italian-americans because he’s against this hydroelectric dam”.
[QUOTE=also you]
I know that that is a tad strawmanish, but if you say really stupid or loathsome shit, I think society needs to have recourse. And if “destroy” means he had to live in his mother’s basement and work at the Quickstop, then so be it. His life might suck, but so do the lives of millions of other people.
[/QUOTE]
(Emphasis mine.)
I’d be a lot more eager to write off the persecution aspect were it not for the people who reacted to this by saying that they wanted more persecution. And it’s a little disingenuous to say both of those things at once.
I remember a while back I was all in favor of punching Nazis. I loved those Richard Spencer remixes. Because, well, they’re nazis. You don’t debate nazis, you beat the shit out of them, marginalize them, and make sure they can’t take power. But now I see why people were concerned. James Damore is not a nazi. At worst, he’s confused but bringing up an important point about a hostile workplace environment towards him and his ilk; at best, he’s bringing up multiple real and serious problems surrounding his company. James Damore is not a nazi, but he’s getting called one anyways. If we are willing to take extreme steps towards a group, we’d better make sure that group is well-defined and deserving. Apparently that’s not really possible, and I probably should have figured that out sooner. My mistake.
This connection, although rather intuitive, does, in fact, seem to be false or at least heavily confounded.
Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five - PMC again.
Gender Differences in Five Factor Model Personality Traits in an Elderly Cohort: Extension of Robust and Surprising Findings to an Older Generation - PMC
And one may find other studies that reach other conclusions. But if he’s wrong here, he’s not wrong because he’s a nazi, or a misogynist, or because he hates women. He’s wrong because he didn’t meta-analyze all of the available literature, and decided that a few good peer-reviewed papers was good enough to hang his hat on. You could say that this is not good enough, but how many people are much more rigorous about these things? It feels like an isolated demand for rigor. We should *not *treat honest but failed and harmless attempts at rational inquiry this way!
As i said, I dont agree with his firing, but I also think his ideas are way off base.
He passes off alot of his own feelings as scientific fact.
He says (repeatedly) that he is in favor of diversity but then says that due to biological differences between the sexes that the efforts of Google to try and increase the diversity are at a minimum a waste of time and resources and at most actually promoting discrimination against men.
He points out that the way business (in general, not just at Google) is done makes it harder for women to succeed, and just seems to accept this as a given; something we should accept and not fight so hard against. Never once saying that maybe its the way we do business that is wrong. Never acknowledging that just because it’s they way it’s always been done, doesn’t make it right.
He fails to take into consideration that business has been dominated by men for a long time and so the practices have evolved to best suit the way men approach business. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does make it much harder for women to succeed, and if we are truly honest in saying that we want women to succeed at business as well as men do, then maybe we need to take a long hard look at those business practices and maybe adjust them so that they are more suitable to both men and women.
He shouldn’t have been fired for saying these things, but he is at best a reactionary saying why should we change the way we make buggy whips, it’s always worked fine in the past, if women want to make buggy whips they should do it the way everyone always has, and if they dont want to do it that way well we shouldnt force them to, maybe it’s just agin nature for women to make buggy whips!
You’ll get no argument from me on that point.
But the outrage over his points are, imho, to be expected and justified.
Look, this guy isn’t an innocent victim who should be allowed to move on.
He’s literally comparing working for Google to being in a Gulag today. This is so over the top bone-headed wrong and stupid that I would be surprised if he’s ever able to get another job at a large company. I certainly wouldn’t hire him!
He was a software engineer employed by Google. If he can learn to keep his mouth shut and can wait until the next “big controversial story”, then he’ll easily find a job.
How many lines of writing are devoted to a scientific analysis of the effect of sexism versus biases due to biological differences between men and women? This guy dipped his foot into an extremely controversial topic by claiming he had a rational analysis of the situation, but he didn’t have the whole story. If you are going to publicly comment on a topic like this you better be ready with all the data but he wasn’t.
I do empathize with him, I did a very similar thing early in my career and the results were ugly, to say the least. But the problem wasn’t “everyone else”, it was the fact I was poorly prepared to discuss more than a single facet of a complex topic.
By the way, political diversity in the workplace has absolutely no value.
Depends on how much you like drama and employee conflicts.