It'll be hard to convince anyone that it'd be viable for him to continue his work after ostracizing a sizable part of Google's workforce by implying they are undeserving of their jobs.

It could have been an attempt to start an honest discussion, but it was horrendously articulated, failed miserably to get the point across while offending a ton of people. He has shown appallingly poor judgement in his choice of format and utter disregard for the consequences of openly questioning corporate policies.

He didn't. The only one who was (literally) ostracized was Damore.

>consequences of openly questioning corporate policies.

Well, the policy was (supposedly) that you could in fact question corporate policies. Of course 'everyone knew' that it was bullshit, but at least now it's been proven and thrown into public for all to see.

I'm fine with a company not wanting openness, less so with such a company pretending to want openness. If Google subscribes to modern-day Lysenkoism (because they think it'll get them more profit) then that is their right, but at least quit the whole pretense and be honest about it: "Our company is about making money, not truth, not justice, not the betterment of society, but money, money, money."

But of course, that gets you less starry-eyed young minds than the "Don't be Evil" of yesteryear, so it's understandable they keep the mask on. Corporations are sociopaths.

Up until it went viral and everybody with a computer read it, Google was mostly ignoring it. When it leaked outside the company, it could no longer be ignored because it was damaging the company's reputation.

Disguising their attacks as a defense, and blowback as an attack is a staple of the progressive playbook by now. Once you tease apart actual cause and effect in these situations, the presupposed victim and oppressor labels tend to fall apart. Especially when one side gets uncritical media coverage across the board.

It didn't seem to prevent her from making a career out of her status as a victim either. Not so much for the person she got fired. Which makes it all the more unpalatable that this agenda is often pushed under the guise of accountability.

It's the first I've heard of the DDoS though. Got a source on that?

Second, you are failing to distinguish between mass coercion by media based on lies, with a popular backlash based on an accurate account of the facts. Richards was in developer relations and made a giant stink when she demonstrated being unable to relate to developers.

b) Damore wrote the memo that caused the backlash, not the media.

I'm thinking "Animal Farm". It's a process, a takeover of the mind. It doesn't start with government and doesn't end at government.

To be fair, it's not "orwellian" in literally every sense of the word, that was just a figure of speech.

Effectively they're saying that the "Hostile Work Environment" clause is used to pressure corporations to limit speech of their employees. Evidence also suggests enforcement is ideologically biased.

http://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-pa...

[0] Links from the paper in order not counting internal g/ go/ links, whatever those are (not all of them technically citations, but some are; many just to help point out that a technical definition is being used and a common parlance one the reader may have in mind shouldn't be used):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

http://righteousmind.com/largest-study-of-libertarian-psych/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism

http://www.bradley.edu/dotAsset/165918.pdf (My favorite in-context just because the link text is "research suggests", a common phrase that all too commonly lacks any sort of citation or link of any kind.)

http://quillette.com/2017/07/15/time-stop-worrying-first-wor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_fatality#Risk_fac...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01623095929...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5068300/

https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...

https://groups.google.com/a/google.com/d/msg/coffee-beans-di...

http://www.businessforum.com/WSJ_Race-on-Campus-05-06-2016.p...

https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.htm...

https://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-psyc...

https://becauseits2015.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/a-non-femini...

http://www.warrenfarrell.net/Summary/

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-per...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00139

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/rabble-rouser/201209/li...

https://nypost.com/2016/04/17/conservative-professors-must-f...

https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/08/18/44...

https://www.google.com/search?q=political+correctness

https://bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-it...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691616659391...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jjycJDLHc9oixA7FiG3-M2yJ...

http://www.spsp.org/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response

Someone with his credentials should not expect to be spoon fed justifications for company hiring practices. If he had opened discussion on the validity of specific findings and which experiments contain the most valuable information for predicting benefits of policy changes, I don't think there would have been this outcry.

But if he wants to discuss the science he first needs to make it clear that he's read it.

When conditions are set that reduce or control for these social factors (including implicit bias) the differences in performance that James Demore attributes to "biological" factors disappear.

How is this not related to the bulk of his claims?

That's a bold prediction supported by no real-world evidence whatsoever. Where's your control group? Where's the retort society that has all this bias removed or even quantified?

Of course societal effects affect the outcome of a person's career, but the idea that there is absolutely zero influence of biological differences is pure dogma. However, it's convenient (if not imperative) to believe, if you're a strong social constructivist.

How about we accept the consensus of the scientists? Rather than calling it dogma because it doesn't agree with YOUR world view.

Secondly, you're making an "argument from authority", which is an intellectual embarrassment. Scientific knowledge is not based on consensus, but on evidence. The theory behind climate change is not supported by the amount of scientists that "believe" in it, but by the evidence they bring forth.

It's the science itself that these people don't want to accept, if it doesn't support their idea that people and society are malleable enough to solve all these unequal distributions.

You probably heard of research that shows that the female population clusters towards to the mean in various features, IQ being one: http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2017/06/why-a...

If we suppose that being successful in STEM correlates strongly with a high IQ, the mere fact that there exist fewer females with a high IQ would be one reason why there would be fewer females in STEM. That's just an objective, logical conclusion. Another logical conclusion would be that no diversity program could change this discrepancy.

The sound way to challenge this would be to challenge the research here, i.e. the foundation of the argument, instead of persecuting a person making such an argument. In other words: "Don't shoot the messenger".

Before you attempt to reason from basic principals to a defense of the status quo, you should attempt to fully understand those principles.

Maybe you should elaborate on why it is innumerate and disconnected. As for calling it "offensive", that's entirely irrelevant. It outs you as somebody who is more interested in silencing people than debating them on more objective merits.

> Research on gender and IQ does not show that "there exist fewer females with high IQ"

Research does show that there exist fewer females at either ends of the distribution and more towards the center, compared to males.

http://www.aei.org/publication/statistical-tests-shows-great...

This does mean that there exist fewer female individuals with exceptionally high or exceptionally low IQs. That is indeed how statistics work.

If you want to contest that the research is flawed and that the result is wrong, do that. If we suppose the data is valid, then my conclusion is sound.

> And there are an enormous number of women in STEM: the concern is that there are few of them in computer science.

The broader concern is STEM, not just computer science. Sure, there's an enormous amount of women in STEM, there's also an enormous amount of men in STEM and if you put both in relation, the relative amount of women in STEM is quite low (compared to other fields).

The only real argument here is how much (if any) of that is due to causes that aren't social.

Negligible, based on the statistics. The differences, if they even exist, are minuscule, while the gender disparity is enormous. It strains credibility to imagine that the root cause of the gender disparity in STEM employment is innate, especially since the disparity varies across cultures and subfields.

(Obviously, there is a [weak] rebuttal that preserves the original claim with the new distributional argument).

"Before you attempt to reason from basic principals to a defense of the status quo, you should attempt to fully understand those principles."

"This is armchair-pundit-bullshit akin to climate change denial."

Aren't they worth personal warnings? If so, I'd really like it if you could give them out, just so that there isn't any injustice here.

Nevertheless, as most of our mothers taught us, two wrongs don't make a right, and someone else violating the rules is no excuse. If you do that repeatedly (and you have), you're going to get banned here for obvious reasons.

I'm not asking for a "two wrongs make one right" defense, I'm asking for equal treatment. You flagged my comment even though it was arguably much less of an "attack" than what I quoted.

I don't fault you for not catching those quotes early, I'm faulting you for not flagging those comments as well now that you have been made aware. In the time you wrote your reply, you could've easily copy pasted a warning to those comments as well.

If you really don't want to give the impression that you're singling out me and my position for suppression, that's what you could still do.

dang most likely didn't flag you.

Everybody can flag (just click in the x minutes ago link and you'll see that post as top leveel including a link to flag it).

I think dang and other mods looks for flagged posts in the backend.

That said: don’t abuse flags like some other people around here do (IMO).

Also: don’t argue with the mods. They have enough to deal with a few people on both sides :-/

Thanks for pointing that out. My apologies to @dang, then.

Having said that, that's a pretty lame feature to have, considering that there's no way to see what the flagged comment was. For posterity, this is what I said:

"I never switched anything. The conclusion that "there aren't as many high-IQ women" comes from "there is a higher variance in the distribution of male intelligence". It's been there from the beginning.

You have to actually follow the links I give and pay attention during reading."

This isn't something that's actually known.

> The differences, if they even exist, are minuscule, while the gender disparity is enormous.

Small differences can dramatically change outcomes.

> It strains credibility to imagine that the root cause of the gender disparity in STEM employment is innate, especially since the disparity varies across cultures and subfields.

"It strains credibility" is another veiled argument from authority. The "root cause" can be different for every culture. Let's imagine that a culture forces STEM to be disproportionately desirable because of societal/economic pressure. It will push more people into the STEM field that wouldn't have joined "naturally".

Then, let's imagine a culture where there are no pressures either way whatsoever. The "innate" differences (if they are allowed to exist) will dominate the outcome completely.

Now let's look at some real-world examples: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2...

Would you suspect that more societal pressure (in either direction) is applied in Europe/USA or in China/India/Latin America?

How in the world is this article supposed to buttress your argument that women are somehow innately unfit for STEM careers? The article literally says "A recent study found that rather than too few girls opting to study scientific subjects or women forgoing careers to care for their children, the biggest cause of gender imbalance in Stem is cultural." Clicking through the link, you get to this paper [1], which is in fact a pretty thorough refutation of your entire position.

[1]: http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopa...

> How in the world is this article supposed to buttress your argument that women are somehow innately unfit for STEM careers?

I never made that argument. You're in the same boat as the people that got James fired by misrepresenting his view. Whether it's lack of reading comprehension or malevolence on your part, I'm not going to deal with you further.

> The article literally says "A recent study found that rather than too few girls opting to study scientific subjects or women forgoing careers to care for their children, the biggest cause of gender imbalance in Stem is cultural."

I'm not actually saying the causes aren't cultural. To the contrary.

> Clicking through the link, you get to this paper [1], which is in fact a pretty thorough refutation of your entire position.

I don't see how exactly that's the case, but given that you're unable to even represent my position properly, I'm not interested in investigating this with you any further.

My "opponent" maintains that any "non-social" causes are "neglible". He doesn't have to explain what exact social mechanism causes one split for CS and another split for mathematics. I think that's entirely besides the point anyway.

My point is merely that because even small differences in variance can dramatically change outcomes, the differences can't be disregarded just because they are small.

My point also is not that the social effects are neglible! I'm sure they're quite significant, in fact.

I didn't actually claim that, you just keep going with the misrepresentations, otherwise you'd have not leg to stand on. I was very careful to put enough weasel language and conditionals in there to not make a factual claim, exactly because I didn't bother to look into whatever some (potentially flawed) research says.

What I actually said was: "If we suppose that being successful in STEM correlates strongly with a high IQ, the mere fact that there exist fewer females with a high IQ would be one reason why there would be fewer females in STEM. That's just an objective, logical conclusion. Another logical conclusion would be that no diversity program could change this discrepancy."

I'm not making any claim as to whether the supposition is true, or whether the correlation is true, or what IQ is, or whether the influence is even significant. All this is happening in your imagination, through confirmation bias.

Secondly, heritability may only account for 40-60%, but that's more than zero. Now, how many percentage points do you suppose could be influenced by diversity programs over at Google?

For a scientist's analysis of the memo, see this:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifes...