This guy expressed his opinions, and a witch hunting mob, because that's what it was, descended on him from all over the internet to rip his reputation to shreds for things he didn't do or write (most of the outrage was about 'perceived' slights).
It's just sad... The worst part was that it validated a lot of what he said, and people somehow just don't see the irony in that.
Why are you changing the meaning of what he wrote? He didn't say that at all. He was very clear that he was talking about the group not any individuals.
If you choose to misunderstand what someone said, when they did a good job of explaining it clearly, then I think you shouldn't spread that misunderstanding around in a way that will hurt people, as it hurt this guy.
But, see, it's equally clear to other people that he was dogwhistling like crazy. This is the problem with this "discussion" - one side is doing the "only exact literal words count for meaning" dance (which, for me, is complete bullshit) whilst the other is saying "that's not how the real world works, context and implication is important".
The two sides are never going to agree - which is ok - but one side is going to struggle with this kind of issue forever until they accept how reality works.
Kinda like an awful high school literature teacher.
Of course but when many people agree on the same hidden meanings, you surely have to consider that they might be there.
We'll have to disagree on that - subtext is an important factor to consider, especially in political / charged contexts.
Since when does that excuse anything? If he'd written "Jews are, in general, hateful monsters. Not the Jews who work here, they're great, but most of the rest" does that statement become acceptable?
More importantly, Mr Damore does not know all the women at Google personally. He cannot. So when he says "In general, women are less suited to/interested in programming careers", he cannot possibly implicitly mean "but clearly that does not apply to every woman currently employed at Google, who were all hired because they are the best in the world at their jobs". Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices. For this to be true, Google must have at least once hired a woman where a better male candidate was available, and more importantly must do so more often than they do the reverse.
If you are going to make general statements about a group of people, then you should not be surprised when individuals in that group assume you mean that statement to apply to them.
Should white NBA players be offended by that statement? The answer is obvious: they shouldn't as that only means they were the ones on the tail of the genetic distribution and made it anyway or maybe even they overcome disadvantages to get there.
Now I say: women are in general less likely to be interested in tech and less likely to become good programmers because they are, on average, less competitive and less likely to devote themselves to solitude practice which is often necessary to become a very good coder.
Should women, who already made it to Google be offended? Of course they shouldn't for the same reasons as above. We can however do something with this information: we can try changing tech world to be more welcoming to women. This way we can avoid sexist hiring practices (gender quotas are clear discrimination) while still achieving more diverse environment.
Those are the points of the manifesto. Being offended by that is the problem of those taking offence as it doesn't speak well about their ability to reason about distributions of traits in a population.
I don't know: I'm not an NBA player and have no idea what the experience of becoming one is like. But there is a difference in kind here. He didn't say "Men are better suited to be Google employees", he said "Men are better suited to be programmers". The closer analogy here is to say that "Black people are better basketball players than white people", and here it might well be fair for white NBA players to be offended. There is a distinction between saying "More of X are good enough to pass this bar", and "X is better than Y". People who can pass the bar are unlikely to be offended for themselves (though they may be offended for others who don't attempt to cross that bar), but they may be offended for themselves if the suggestion is that they are worse than their colleagues.
But if you said, in addition, "The NBA currently employs discriminatory hiring practices that favour white athletes at the expense of black ones", then they should be offended. At that point you are saying "I believe that group X is better than group Y, and many of group Y are here despite there being better members of group X". That is offensive.
> We can however do something with this information: we can try changing tech world to be more welcoming to women.
I have a suggestion as to how to do that: stop saying that women are worse at coding. Just don't even bring it up. This goes doubly because there is no evidence for that at all.
You can make the tech world more welcoming to women by welcoming more women, and then give them the opportunity to succeed. Writing think pieces about how women are so ill-suited to coding doesn't just display a stunning lack of understanding about how the industry got started, it also makes it clear that right now you think women don't belong.
But if the view is that "software work as it is today is just not women's work, so we should make it more like women's work", then I'm sorry but you've already lost.
And there is solid evidence for that difference, and it should be brought up, and asking to stop the discussion is, frankly, ridiculous - we can all see that there is an important open problem with different viewpoints and thus it should be discussed, and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.
I wasn't replying to the memo, I was replying to bluecalm, and bluecalm said this:
> Now I say: women are in general less likely to be interested in tech and less likely to become good programmers because they are, on average, less competitive and less likely to devote themselves to solitude practice which is often necessary to become a very good coder.
Note "less likely to become good programmers". I feel pretty comfortable with my response given that.
> and expressing all kinds of possible viewpoints should be facilitated.
I disagree. Many kinds of possible viewpoints construct hostile work environments, and should be forbidden. It is simply not necessary to allow a workplace to tolerate all views. We don't allow people to cover their cube in swastikas, walk around greeting all their colleagues with "heil hitler", and to push for the dismissal of all their Jewish colleagues in an attempt to reduce the influence of the hidden Jewish conspiracy running the world.
If Mr Google had wanted to write this on his personal blog I wouldn't have cared at all. But he didn't do that: he wrote it at work, in his professional capacity, and posted it for his co-workers to see. Guess what: speech at work is something that can get you fired. See Colin Kaepernick for evidence.
He clearly can, were it not for affirmative actions - if you assume perfect recruitment based on merit, you can expect everyone accepted to be suitable for the role. But in this case you'll also find, as the memo author explained quite sensibly, that the gender ratio might not be 1:1 due to distribution of interest in the population, which affects the distribution of the candidate pool.
I mean, come on, this is a pretty obvious point - and I'm starting to believe that it takes intent to misread it like you did.
> Damore asserts that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices.
Yes, that's the definition of affirmative action. It's literally discriminating in order to counter perceived discrimination in the opposite direction.
I...don't think I did misread it? I said "he cannot mean this", and you appear to agree with me: due to the facts on the ground, he cannot have intended to mean that. Therefore, I have to assume he did not mean that.
So if he believes that Google employs discriminatory hiring practices, then he presumably believes that some of his colleagues are not the best possible choice for their role, and do not deserve to be there. That seems like a straightforward reading of his text. Am I wrong?
If the author asserted in the memo that Google practices discriminatory hiring practices ("Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate" is the only relevant language I encountered), wouldn't that imply that some members of Group X currently employed at Google are less qualified than the members of Group Y who were discriminated against? Otherwise it would seem we are discussing a situation where tiebreaks tend to be decided in favor of the current minority group, or recruitment efforts for underrepresented groups are more intensive. The "lower the bar" phrase would seem to imply that he believes there are different standards in effect for selecting current employees.
The memo author's point about differing interest distributions does not necessarily imply anything about ability differences in the current Google employee pool, but claiming discriminatory hiring practices might.
Except he did not publish it, My understanding it put it on a internal system shared with a few people, other people inside google shared it more and more people inside of google until another Google Employee sent it to Motherboard or Gizmodo who published it for the world to see.
So then would you support Google firing who ever sent internal communications to a "news" organization which is likely in violation of company policy?
I'm not aware of any executives of large institutions that are perfectly happy with leaks. They just usually aren't dumb enough to pretend that a rant like this wouldn't get leaked.
You seem to agree
I agree completely. Just like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_77
Very unprofessional!
Anyone who publishes an incoherent 10 page manifesto insulting their coworkers and trashing their company's policies can reasonably expect to get fired. It doesn't matter if any of the bosses agree or disagree with the opinions expressed; it's just an unprofessional thing to do.
To be honest, he was the bully in this situation. I have more concern for the women at Google who could fear losing their jobs and the means to support their families. If a coworker of mine started publicly saying that I'm not genetically qualified for the work I do, I would be worried for my job. However, I don't think those women would become radicalized over this. Why? Because intelligent professional people don't become radicalized when other people disagree with their opinions.
A note about Trump: I grew up in a red state and lived and worked in two others. I never spent more than a few months in a blue state so I don't know how it is there, but in Trump country people openly and aggressively express all sorts of opinions without fear of recrimination. There may be a few voices of dissent, but there are no "witch-hunting mobs" forcing them to keep their views a secret.
I think this scenario Giulio describes fits better to Brendan Eich who was essentially forced out of Mozilla over his views. But Brendan didn't become radicalized. He picked himself up and founded a new company, because that's what professionals do.