Well, more specifically, I think he was fired for being political in a way that caught outside attention and caused bad PR. Plenty of people are political at work, whether they be work politics or otherwise. This is a "You made the company have to weigh in on something that is way over your pay grade, and that's not something we're going to take a chance happening again with you." Executives and boards don't like when they have to stop what they're doing and put out a PR fire started by a low rank employee, whether that employee expected that outcome or not. That the firing of the employee causing problems at the executive level coincides with a way to combat the PR just makes the decision all that much easier.
E.g. "Big pharma researcher says our system is killing people." If it wasn't already done and old news, if it happened to get traction we'd have the same situation. And let's not kid ourselves, he's probably not the first there to state this or even the first to share his views. He is the first that had it turn into big news because it went viral, but content isn't the only factor in something going viral.
Of course not. That's the difference here. It was a work-provided place soliciting feedback on the company's diversity and hiring policies. Politics are already present in the existing policy.
That would be the actual alt-left equivalent here.
It's unbelievable that in 2017, in a field that is vastly dominated by males, someone would have the gall to claim "trying to introduce more diversity is repression."
Can you imagine if the roles were reversed, and the nurses association said "well, we don't really want more males in the profession because they are clearly not biologically ready to deal with people. We'd love to have them, but clearly they are not interested so we'll set a quota on how many can be certified per year"? The same people defending Damore would be flipping their shit.
Because it's not your definition of equality? Why not impress us with your own brand of philosophy by writing a cited, 10-page memo on the topic, then maybe you'll get buy-in.
> It's unbelievable that in 2017
Why? Is 2017 the year that its ok to repress individuals in favour of their respective political/identity group statistics? "introducing more diversity" is a sinister sugar-coating of what's happening here.
> we don't really want more males in the profession because they are clearly not biologically ready to deal with people
You mean imagine an entirely different thing? If someone explained why so few men chose to go into nursing using the same reasoning, they would not "[flip] their shit" - only because you manufactured an aspect not in the memo. He doubly-so didn't suggest setting a quota on women in IT, which is the cherry on the strawman.
I didn't "compare Damore to Rosa Parks", someone argued that Damore shouldn't have voiced his opinion for fear of not being hireable, and I compared this to Rosa Parks being told she'd have difficulty catching a bus. Given the comments you've posted already across HN, I believe it is you that has a problem.
> someone argued that Damore shouldn't have voiced his opinion for fear of not being hireable, I compared this to Rosa Parks being told she'd have difficulty catching a bus
Same thing.
No one is "pretending [they] are a repressed minority", you just assume this because you think that has to be the case before individual equality is necessary. Minorities and majorities, repressed or otherwise, all deserve fair treatment.
And yet, here you are, advocating for using a weak "biological" argument to be unfair to a minority.
A: "Damore's memo says 2 + 2 = 5!!"
B: "No it doesn't."
A: "prove it doesn't!!"
I defend Damore's memo against stuff it didn't say, what exactly can I specify, other than quote the entire thing to demonstrate what isn't in it? The memo accurately portrays itself, it even starts of with a summary stating it's main points and aims.
What I have done is repeatedly ask you which specific part led you to your conclusions. You want me to prove a negative here? The burden is on you to defend your claims.
You have also attributed a number of claims to me that I have not made (e.g. there is zero gender-bias in tech). I also do not bear a burden of proof for claims I did not make.
Very simple: tell me what exactly in Damore's memo resonates with you, why do you think it's true. That's all. Even if it's restating, in two sentences, what you believe to be the content of the memo.
> What I have done is repeatedly ask you which specific part led you to your conclusions. You want me to prove a negative here? The burden is on you to defend your claims.
And when I do, you just say "but he never said that!". Apparently there's no interpretation possible other than whatever super narrow interpretation you came to. Everything else is poppycock.
> You have also attributed a number of claims to me that I have not made (e.g. there is zero gender-bias in tech)
That's rich. You asked me to prove there's a problem. Why would you ask me to do it? If you acknowledge that there is gender bias, then how can you possibly believe there is no problem? It doesn't follow.
Also, I think Damore's 50/50 diversity logic stoked lot of bad feelings both for and against. No diversity policy aims for 50/50, rather help raise the percentage of under represented (in this case women) more than what was in the past. He modelled his whole memo based on this 50/50 diversity split and went on to suggest that biologically 50/50 representation is not at all possible, which may be true but that is not the point or aim of a diverse workplace.
I read the memo 3 times over several days just to make sure that I don't miss a key thing (and I'm still no fully sure). But I bet a hell lots of people who commented on it didn't even read it thoroughly once.
One could argue though that Damore should have expected this (but maybe he actually did. I can totally imagine that he had mentally prepared himself before to get fired over this).
When you want to prove a paper wrong you don't need delve on every nuance, you just need to prove the base premise is flawed. Not sure why Damore deserves a different treatment, when clearly he's trying to build an argument and proposes "solutions" based on it.
> One could argue though that Damore should have expected this
Oh, I'm pretty sure he was looking for this.
Even if so, that assumes that the base premise actually has been correctly identified.
His base premise was not "women are worse engineers than men". Yet this is what most critics and media argued against.
His base premise was about differences in the average distribution of traits, which is a completely different thing, doesn't say anything about abilities of an individual, and actually is not that flawed. There is plenty of scientific evidence pointing towards that direction. It's not total consensus but describing it as "flawed" would be pretty ignorant, as far as I can interpret the scientific status quo.
But understanding this base premise required that people actually would have put some own thought into what they read, and were open to nuance.
(That's an honest question, BTW, not trying to be inflammatory)
From the point of view of a young white male fresh out of school, to hold them back for no other reason than a female PoC is deemed more diversically attractive, is indeed repression.
You are OK with a woman not being hired because of gender bias - which exists right now, instead of in a potential future imagined by Damore - as long as you get hired. In other words: let's not solve the current problems, just so that we introduce one that might potentially affect you.
Nice.
Proof/citations please. And with "concrete numbers" - if you are going to correct for bias, you need to know its magnitude.
Concrete numbers? Just look at the current 80%/20% division. Considering people like Damore exist, it's fair to assume that at least a >0% skew exists because of gender bias. But don't take it from me, just go ask any woman o(even the ones that Damore mentions in his memo.)
Next question?
(BTW, what a ridiculous argument you are trying to make. Even Damore, who you take as an eminent authority in the subject, admits there's gender bias in the industry.)
Whatever. When facts fail, thrown around labels and malicious speculation.
> people like you in the field ... OK to apply gender bias
> Even Damore ... admits there's gender bias in the industry
Please provide quotes for either me or Damore being in favor of some kind of "[application] of gender bias". Or that where I claim there is no gender bias? Please drop that strawman.
> it's fair to assume that at least a >0% skew exists because of gender bias.
And Where does Damore claim there is no gender bias? Other than right at the beginning where he says "I am not denying sexism exists".
> go ask any woman
seriously..
> what a ridiculous argument you are trying to make
Well, you are the eminent authority of ridiculous arguments.
Supporting the completely out of whack status quo is enough. I know, next up you'll say "I never said I support the status quo!". Because that's what you do.
> > go ask any woman > seriously..
Seriously. How many female engineers do you work with on a day-to-day basis? How many do you know outside of work? Ask them about their experiences with sexual harassment or gender stereotyping. Every woman I know who works in tech has had to deal with some of it at some point or the other.
> Well, you are the eminent authority of ridiculous arguments.
At leas I have arguments, you have none.
And no, we won't be able to ever rationally discuss this when opponents straw man the memo as you're doing here.
It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.
>It's not similar. It's not even remotely similar, that's what you don't get.
It looks similar to me, very similar (and i'm ok with it because it is against conservatives this time).
Mr. Damore has already been offered a job by Wikileaks. He's making the media rounds. He's being hailed as a hero by Breitbart and other right-wing talk shows. Chances are, he's not going to have trouble finding another job.
The U.S. has a super long history of half the country thinking that the other half has gone insane. See eg. the elections of 1800, 1824, 1828, 1860, 1888, 1896, 1912, 2000, and 2016, along with other watershed moments in American politics like the Alien & Sedition acts, Hamilton/Burr duel, Compromise of 1850, FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, Civil Rights Movement, Nixon impeachment, Whitewater, Vietnam & Iraq wars, etc. Someday we'll probably break apart, but a system based on the premise that we're all little shits who need to fight each other has shown remarkable resilience.
I worked with a guy circa 2002 who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was from a fundamentalist Christian sect who had _all_ his teeth knocked out by the butt of a gun in a Russian prison. This would have been sometime in the 1990s.
He was a good engineer but pretty abrasive, and ended up leaving on his own accord. But even _if_ he was fired for expressing his unorthodox political or religious ideas at work, I doubt he'd equivocate it with the treatment he received in Russia.
All these senseless equivocations do everybody harm. Supposedly liberal college students do something similar with their micro-aggression framing device; it's not reasonable in that context, either.
We can debate Damore's points endlessly. But at the end of the day plenty of women still suffer old-school sex discrimination across the board. As that disappears, I'm pretty confident we'll have less reason to discuss more abstract discrimination issues.
Basically, if you disagree with some of the approaches utilized by the left for addressing discrimination (and there's plenty that reasonable people could disagree with), then the most constructive reaction is to redirect the discussion to more concrete, historical manifestations of discrimination.
Most ideologies on the right and left are constructed of poor equivocations and metaphors. And the so-called culture war is just an endless escalation in the sophistication and depth of equivocation and metaphor.
It's like in programming. Most debate is pointless bike shedding once the discussion is divorced from a reproducible bug or well-articulated pain points. Which isn't to mean if it's not clearly reproducible that a problem can't exist; just that if the problem isn't yet empirically grounded you can't have productive discourse. Equivocation rarely helps in this regard. If you have to resort to equivocation you've all but conceded that the problem lacks the necessary qualities which make it amenable to solving.
If you can't have productive discourse, then there are better ways to spend your time. There's no dearth of reproducible bugs or well-articulated pain points, in programming or in society. And people are always free to put in the hard work of empirically grounding a debate. Unfortunately, discrimination research is inherently tendentious because of the nature of the problem, which compounds all the other shortcomings of economic, sociologic, and psychological methodologies. But it's not impossible and we should encourage people to take up the challenge. Part of that encouragement is to criticize pointless equivocations; to make it clear that they're not an acceptable substitute.
In the USSR after the War, if you merely criticized the Party line (e.g. say "We are a Communist country but the Proletariat is rarely consulted by the Party, I think the Party has to pay more attention what the working class people think.") you'd get the treatment ardit33 described. You would not get arrested, you would not be thrown in prison, you'd just get, what they called "wolf's ticket" - a record of "anti-soviet agitation" and then you would not be able to get any decent job, ever. People worked as janitors or threw coal in the communal central heating. Usually a single case of doubting was not enough, you'd get a talking first (quite unlike Google, it seems). Only people who directly opposed the Party were repressed with prison/mental institution.
I can't know for sure whether my old co-worker was telling the truth. But there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that aligned well with the story. And while I don't know the precise timeline, it's not necessarily relevant.
It's still not even remotely similar.
How else am I supposed to create a Christian establishment, such as school for K-12 children? What if it's part of my wholesome Christian values and worldview to create a healthy environment where children can learn, free of homosexual influence?
For people that were less political danger, they usually were fired for "Political Incorrectness" and "Agitation and Propaganda", sent to re-education classes, and only given shitty job opportunities from now then. It was a convenient way to keep the less dangerous masses at bay.
If "being conservative" becomes a "fireable" offense in most large tech valleys, then we are in a path to similar stances.
Now, here where I disagree with the memo in general (it didn't seem constructive), I disagree with the way google handled the whole situation overall.
Anyway, this whole episode (if you are not a feminist you are the enemy stance and the black list that managers at google have) starts smelling more of a McCarthyism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
For people that just want to do their job and don't want to get involved in these discussions you almost are forced to do something, otherwise you are an evil/enemy/suppressor/whatever else. That bothers me, as I lived under communism and have lived the results of blind ideology.