There is a market force pushing software companies into leftist positions (since influential demographics in the industry are strongly pro-left; also this creates positive feedback loop).

In this context Google’s behavior is rational, and this guy tried to fight it with reason and argument (I was laughing hard when I was reading the manifesto) and got steamrolled in the process, proving the argument made in his memo by personal example.

That's bullshit. Write a "manifesto" about how senior executive compensations are to high, the company should be taken over by the employees and that private ownership of properties is a crime. That's the REAL leftist position. Then send that manifesto out to thousands of employees on the company's internal mailing list and see how long you last.

People fail to see the point... Yes, there are many "leftist" positions. The above is one of them. The point is that expressing that position on an internal mailing list most certainly puts your employment in jeopardy. It doesn't matter what the position is (abortion, drug legalization, gay weddings, military attacks on civilians, foreign relations, ...), what matter is where you express it.

These gender ideologies and the application of positive discrimination are an affront to left position. Since more than a hundred years, the left strongest identification trait was the fight to end discrimination. When now discrimination is applied in the name of diversity, that can't be a left value. This is something else, and it comes from somewhere else.

I'm not saying the position does not exist, and I'm not saying the groups purporting them don't look like left groups. But talk with some communists or socialists. They can't get behind this. My point is that this gender movement is its own political/ideological thing, that has just a very small overlap with left identification markers. It uses their style, not more.

This is probably part of the usual problem, that the left-right distinction doesn't really capture the political landscape.

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/161217-paul...

[2] http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0701-whitehea...

In Germany, with which politics I'm more familiar, it is similar: The political organized left (which is marginal) is for affirmative actions (in the form of quotas for women). The only organization speaking out against them which has some left traits is the (sadly mostly neo-)liberal party.

Interestingly, and that is maybe a good description of my point, the parties implementing quotas for women over here are not left nor progressive. It's the SPD, which is a conservative central party, and the greens, which is a conservative party which fought for environmental protection in the eighties. However, the one remaining left party is also for them. My point may be weak when applied to organized political parties, but I stand behind the ideological argumentation that it is an affront to left values.

If that was (still) a thing Hillary would've won in a landslide. There's a lot more dissent in the left than the right.

Are you saying that Bernie endorsing Hillary is proof that there aren't conflicting views within the Democratic party?

Are you saying that Ron endorsing Trump would've been equal to Bernie supporting Hillary? Qualifications and platform doesn't factor in?

Here's an example of GOP acting as a herd and DNC acting on policy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-2...

It is a proof that that the Democrats knows where their real opponents are, and that is in the Republican party.

>Are you saying that Ron endorsing Trump would've been equal to Bernie supporting Hillary?

Pretty much, yes. Both have a non-mainstream and dedicated following. Both were screwed by their respective parties when they tried to get the nomination.

>Qualifications and platform doesn't factor in?

I'm not sure what do you mean by that, unless you are trying to imply that Ron Paul has a serious ideological foundation deriving from the Mises Institute and based largely on Murray Rothbard's 20th century interpretation of classical liberalism upon which the United States were founded in the 18th century, while Bernie Sanders is pushing USA towards the fate of USSR and other similar implementations of socialist ideas that always end in a disaster.

>Here's an example of GOP acting as a herd and DNC acting on policy:

I knew it's war-related even before I clicked the link. Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply in other areas.

It is a current left wing argument in the United States for "diversity".

It is an old argument that one's ethnicity determines one's personality. I can't say one that I support.

FFS, this story itself is a perfect example. Here we have a corporation firing an employee for 'wrong' speech - and the left is in full support.

That's a class issue, and the left has clearly sided with corporations over the working class.

Just to clarify: I do have some respect for some ideas of the class-based left, unlike for the identity-based one. Roughly speaking, I do agree (though for a different reason) with the idea that the intellectual property should not exist.

In this case it seems that James planned all this to happen and is gonna sue Google:

> "$1 million in bonuses" was changed to "$100 million as a compensation" after Damore was "fired" by a Mr Kunda Píča whom I have never heard of; Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

And about PR, while vocal left leaning activists might cheer decision to fire him, conservative and centrists media used this as great point to smear Google as leftist propaganda. This is great talking point for proving accusations that google manipulates search results to prefer certain political agenda. Recently Jordan Peterson caused quite a stir when his youtube and gmail accounts were revoked, YouTube decided it will start isolating videos with controversial views even if they dont brake ToS...

This moves will be used by anti PC camp a lot to steer users to alternatives to googles products.

Facebook and Twitter already pushed a lot of potential users away by similar behavior, alternative platforms are getting more and more relevant. Its hard to say if this vocal PC SJW activists are just vocal minority or actually majority talking with their wallets. Based on results of recent US elections and financial problems of some feminists and left leaning publications, and on majority of comments on uncensored pages; I would say that PC ship is probably sinking fast.

Then he tweeted that they reviewed revocation it and still didnt restore account.

He then tweeted few influencers like Rubin, Rogan and Harris.

And then he tweeted that his accounts were restored, again with no explanation.

Right media and Youtube anti-SJWs blame this on one Youtube policy to isolate contradicting videos and authors, but I think this was probably mistake by some bot. Maybe Peterson account was mass flagged by some fringe group.

You tube isnt doing themselves a favor with keeping all the details, since this allow those who accuse them of being biased, to use this as an example of censoring anti-SJW personalities.

Yes, if you oppose or even voice disagreement you lose your job.

I expect Googles behaviour in this instance was illegal.

> But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe. Not precise enough to do much good, probably will cause a lot of harm.

> Again, though, most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace (accounting for, perhaps, a few percentage points of the variability between men’s and women’s performances). Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size, and rather than grouping men and women into dichotomous groups, I think sex and sex differences are best thought of scientifically as multidimensional dials, anyway.

> Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at.

> Sex researchers recognize that these differences are not inherently supportive of sexism or stratifying opportunities based on sex.

The problem in the employee's memo seems to be correlating scientific data (which is accurate) to groups of people (women) at Google and their qualifications (inaccurate).

From a personal perspective I get where you are coming from, but from a professional perspective it makes no sense. There are ways to present opposing viewpoints in a workplace without offending half of the people who work there.

Ways like not sharing your opposing viewing at all? From a professional perspective Google's management should have ignored the note. It's unprofessional to become wrapped up in minor drama (posting a note to a message board threatens nobody) and to act in carelessly hurried manner.

Our mistake is prioritizing offense mitigation. So long as a person's primary intent isn't to offend then they should be able to say anything without being fired.

I strongly disagree. If I want to cement my advantages of being a white male I'll propose anything that furthers that goal. My aim wouldn't be to offend someone, but it is still very real side effect of my goal.

Discussing gender differences should obviously not be taboo, nor should other topics, but the motives behind the discussions should likewise be freely scrutinized.

Pandering to offense takers encourages them to seek motives they deem aggressive.

What I mean isn't that I should be able to in practice be offended with what I disagree with, but that blatant agenda pushing behind science that doesn't quite fit your agenda should be questioned.

I'm not offended by facts, I'm offended by dishonesty. We probably don't disagree in concept, but perhaps on this specific case.

It's unfair in the sense that this progressive or far left ideal is allowed to be pushed onto entire organizations and by the media as de facto "right" or "correct", which is inherently a political position and would likely offend anyone who disagrees with it. If these processes and programs should be publicly enacted on people who disagree with them, it's unfair then to disallow any discussion about them under an implicit threat of termination. Google just confirmed that threat is very real. I know many conservatives here (a classical liberal / libertarian mostly myself, which is far too "right leaning" for this area) who are actually scared of any political discussion due to this exact threat, even though those with the "correct" opinions can openly discuss them without any fear of repercussions. I don't think they should because inherently politics brings out discussion and debate, often vigorous forms of it, and that's not generally the best thing for the office, but because that discussion/debate is effectively banned here, it's completely fine to express leftist and socialist ideals publicly, even if in extremely poor taste.

Secondly, if you were to decide to bring up issues with these programs with a person responsible (for instance in Google's case, this VP of diversity) you'd get a predictable dismissal, or they'd silently drop whatever issue you raise, which means you have no actual means with which to present these viewpoints. She publicly dismissed the entire thing without actually refuting any argument that was made, with language that effectively sounded something like "this is wrong think, and Google doesn't agree with this wrong think." You could do it outside of work, but you lose the context and the specifics of the program, and more importantly the impact any such discussion could have on your immediate environment.

These discussions do need to be had, and where they're being had, the majority of even liberal minded people tend to agree with the author of this piece, but it's hard to know if that's a consensus (even at 500,000+ views for instance on each video on YouTube) or if it's just an echo chamber because even demanding rigor and evidence of the ideas behind diversity is taboo in far too many places. For instance tptacek can be found in these very comments essentially arguing that this topic of discussion isn't open because it's been decided. By whom? How can any discussion of highly debatable topics like this be had if people like him and Google are just going to say "it's not up for debate because I'm right" in order to shut down any discussion before it can even begin, hilariously in this case by likening this to discussing child labor or marital rape? It's nice to see logical fallacies are alive and very well with people who otherwise seem fairly intelligent.

http://motls.blogspot.si/2017/08/james-damore-deserves-1-mil...

> As Damore reminded us, most of the people who agree with him only dare to agree privately.

> What do they answer when their opinions are measured through a poll run on Google-plus – which the SJW officials in charge could still hypothetically access? Some other Google employees gave us the following pie chart:

> 14% strongly agree, 22% almost agree with Damore's letter. That's some 36% if you combine it – over 20,000 employees of Google. If you add the 13% of neutral folks, you will get almost 49%, a slightly greater percentage than 48.5% of those who almost disagree or strongly disagree. Clearly, even if the participants of the poll face some risks that their vote could be used against them, the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents.

This is just not how you analyze a poll and maintain the impression of honesty. Although I agree with the conclusion that "the supporters of Damore's view are at least comparable in size to the opponents" (based on the 36%/48.5% split), the obvious willingness of the author to exaggerate support for his side is just despicable.

PC culture? regressive left? feminsts? LGBTQIAPK? lefties?

I agree, but (and call me old fashioned) I don't think these kind of discussions should happen at work and I definitely don't think an employee should be publishing opinionated documents naming the company they work for.

If you read it, it was about his opinions about damage that Ideological Echo Chamber causes to company.

This discussion needs to happen at google. And he made it clear that this arent his opinions but he sourced most of controversial claims in memo.

His paper was completely aligned with section 1.5 of Google's code of conduct that says “Any time you feel our users aren’t being well-served, don’t be bashful - let someone in the company know about it. Continually improving our products and services takes all of us, and we’re proud that Googlers champion our users and take the initiative to step forward when the interests of our users are at stake.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in memo “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it.”

...and fired him anyways. It seems to me that he will easily win on court saying he was fired for political reasons and accuse them of defamation.

"However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace"[1]

[1] https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-...

Sounds like this memo is exactly what that board was for.

Marked down for spreading alternative facts.

Imagine if we weren't allowed to debate, say, programming languages or SQL vs. NoSQL because one side needs to be coddled and can't take the heat. That's essentially what we're doing with "diversity" policies and gender dynamics.

If one thing is true, there's plenty of data to demonstrate non-merit based discrimination. For example, studies that send out the same resume with different names is a common source of data: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...

If you think discrimination only affects women and POCs, you'll be delighted to learn that from second tier law schools that signaled middle class were overwhelmingly the least likely to get called. Being a middle class women yielded 7x better chances and being a wealthy male yielded 13x better chances.

Ironically, being wealthy as a woman put you as a disadvantage.

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-b...

This type of discrimination is real because our brains don't like doing rigorous evaluation. To save energy, we'll substitute in some heuristic and tell ourselves we rigorously evaluated a person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution

Here's the point. Discrimination is real and it costs businesses money. It's like Moneyball. You can be like the Yankees and overpay for players that fit superficial molds, or you could actually be methodical like the 2002 Athletics and hire undervalued players their competitors discounted.

There are real economic incentives to focusing on diversity, especially if you can demonstrate your employees are passing on qualified people for superficial reasons (right school, hobbies, similar to me, culture fit, etc.)

The company that can successfully exploit an industry's hiring bias by targeting discounted groups and evaluating candidates rigorously will have the pick of the litter.

By using them here it seems like you are attempting to marginalize and stigmatize those who consider the manifesto to make some decent points.

Do you have any actual arguments against the manifesto, or do you think that formulating a reasoned response would help legitimize a point of view that you find abhorrent?

The idea behind diversity is not to ignore gender differences, or racial differences, but to have the belief that skill and talent exists can come from anywhere. So these viewpoints that make generalizations about people because of their gender, race etc. serve to exclude the talent that can come from the non-white/male quarter.

Now this person is probably a good engineer, but its fair to say his impact to computing will never be as great as Ada Lovelace, Anita Borg, Fei Fei Li etc. So if a viewpoint like his hinders the next Grace Hopper then firing him is a worthy price.

The thing that the anti diversity warriors fail to understand is that their viewpoints are exclusionary to a whole swath of people, so please dont expect sympathy for your opinion when your viewpoint tells some people to go away just because of their gender/race.

It's really tough to have these discussions when any contrary opinion is equated with "[telling] some people to go away just because of their gender/race."

But it does claim that Google created environment, where people who dont perfectly align with left leaning echo chamber talking points, cant safely express their opinions anymore.

And Googles decision to pander to left leaning echo chamber and fire the guy proved his point.

If you actually read the memo, and not only misinterpretation of it on pro feminist blogs, you would see that he was very careful with words and there isnt single sentence showing his misogyny. All his controversial claims are sourced and he pointed out that this are not his personal opinions.

He even used graphs to show that he doesnt approve generalizations based on average. https://video-images.vice.com/_uncategorized/1502146696203-S...

What you are looking at is a clever guy (former chess champion), who pushed left PC SJW Google to shoot themselves in the foot. He knew what result will be. Google echo chamber activists bullied HR so they needed to fire him. Accusing him of things like misogyny, that cant be proved on court, is enough for character assassination in SJW echo chambers. But in court room where biased interpretation of his memo and words like "anti-women manifesto" or "anti-diversity screed" wont be allowed, he has the upper hand. He has all he needs to prove he was fired unfairly.

> Damore plans to sue Google; he had previously complained to NLRB and wants to argue that his dismissal was a revenge which would be illegal. See a Damore's defiant answer to Reuters.

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

A non-sexist comparison between men on women would be "women on average are not as tall as men". Do you see the difference? There are so many baked-in sexist assumptions to this statement I barely know where to begin, but to name one, I'll point out that women weren't allowed (by law and by culture) to even hold high-status jobs until very recently.

Women traditionally raise children and take care of nest, while men provide resources for family. On average. It can be different, but this is how most families function.

This is the same as women on average are not as tall as man. Its true in most cases, but not always.

Feminist alike always assume that statements like this somehow assume that women are inferior, and to counter this many feminists try to convince women to start acting more masculine. Which is quite ironic actually.

This statement doesnt mean women are inferior. Men actually like women for this traits like patience, compassion, attention to details; because they lack this traits.

There is no need to be upset. Men like femininity at women. On average.

It is better to see what the opposing argument really is which is a liberalist position but in a future ideal United States free of discrimination that most everyone wants to live in. That is evaluating individuals individually based on their merit.

The question is really whether or not affirmative action is morally good, socially necessary, or practically effective.

Two thirds of that argument is possible to evaluate empirically. The other third is not which is why the topic generates so many arguments that are more heat than light like so many political views in the United States.

If you accept that is what is happening and you want to make society better and more positive, having some charity for the opposition I think would help a long way to having productive conversations.

Well, the pregnancy avenue is a significant area of unfairness between the sexes. Women of childbearing age DO have that hanging over their head precisely due to federal law.

There's 2 ways to fix it. Get rid of the federal law (and deny that pregnancy carries complications!) or offer the same benefit to the male.

I'm for offering the same benefit to the male. And now, that both have that law, the differentiation becomes moot.

I have become more open to the idea that the US is a wildly different place.

However it doesn't matter. For the individual person arguing a different point of view you can only succeed in persuading them if you respond to what they are saying fairly and charitably rather than argue with straw men and shadows from your own mind and fears.

That is what I am saying. Your ontology of the argument is too austere. People have other beliefs than women should be able to work or not.