Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. Those are repetitive, tedious, and off topic. Especially the ones that have run a hundred or more times already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Googler got fired for using unhelpful stereotypes.

He didn't repeatedly claim women were inferior engineers (but I understand why people will believe it). Nor was it in my opinion intolerant but it was championed by those who are (there's a difference). It was some other unhelpful stereotype based on gender differences.

The key take away is that generalising based on group Identity should not be done.

Yeah, none of that is the case. The first thing he did after being fired was run to the far-right propaganda outlets. That was very telling of what he actually believed.

You mean the only people who seemed to show him any compassionate, reach out to him or not interpret his actions as negatively as possible are who he started to associate with? Mild shock

"far-right propaganda outlets"? This is very telling about what you actually believe

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did you actually follow this?

His rant was basically just of a list of stock arguments from the scientific racism era.

After he got fired his fans started a fundraiser on a white supremacy website.

His arguments were stock white supremacy and the people who adopted him as a hero were stock white supremacists. This isn't hard to figure out.

None of this is true. His "rant" was a well researched memo with extensive links to state of the art research. You should actually read the real thing, once, instead of the maimed version published by the guardian.

But honestly it's better if you don't know, you're better adjusted to living in this world by remaining ignorant. Just keep reading Vox.

I read the whole thing word for word. I recognized the language and wording from scientific racism tracts. I also tracked down his fundraiser which I haven't seen covered in the news.

It wasn't "scientific racism". First of all its discussion of science pertained to differences in gender, not race. And the author did not argue that women were worse at engineering, but rather that gender differences affect preferences.

While other people may have used his memo to justify sexist beliefs about the capability of female engineers, attributing those words to the original author is at best intellectually dishonest if not outright dishonest.

100% agree. Of the people I know that read the memo (incl women), I know of none who disagreed with it. It's genuinely hard to disagree as he presented facts backed by research to support a theory on the gender balance in tech.

I will add that many people who only read articles paraphrasing and quoting it, did seem to react unfavorably, likely taking the opinion the article wished to portray.

Bigots link to research too.

Damore's links weren't the problem. The unsupported conclusions he drew from the research and the policies that he proposed were the problem.

Which policies proposed by him was a problem?

As I wrote, I understand why people think this.

I think it's more accurate to say his rant was a list from the era of a generation ago which might be the same as the scientific racism era? I don't know.

Totally wrong, his arguments were from the current era of science and not racist. They weren't even close to that.

> As the most base example: the candidate pool for a company like Google is self-selecting. Taking research about women (which I'm accepting uncritically just for the sake of argument in this post) as a population (research which showed a very small, minor difference in certain narrow traits) and implying this tells us anything at all about the women who have applied, let alone been hired, by Google is completely unsupported by science. Women candidates, or engineers, are very far from random samples of the women population.

Damore said exactly this in the memo, your post only proves that you didn't really read or understand it.

> He misapplied science to make a point that's not supported by science

Perhaps other Google employees should have responded with "You appear to be making a flawed argument. Here's where we think your argument goes off the rails, and why."

Assuming Damore was arguing in good faith, such a response might have changed the minds of Damore or other like-minded employees.

But simply firing Damore was at best a missed opportunity, and at worst evidence that the majority view is simply a matter of opinion with no real justification.

Keep in mind that the majority of googlers according to a blind poll did not want him fired. Also the memo was circulated for a month internally. Damore didn't get fired until it was leaked to to media and they ran hit pieces that ranges from intellectually dishonest to outright dishonest. I put the blame for this fiasco on the highly slanted media coverage that put Google in a position where they had to fire Damore or get skewered for sexism.

I'm trying to figure out what you mean by "white supremacy" because you use it so often it seems like something nebulous.

--

So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall term for anything that argues a biological basis for group differences. Thank you for the links and for not just being aghast that I didn't know this. :]

We'll Google it for you.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/James_Damore#Sex_and_drugs_and...

RationalWiki has a very opinionated take on things, but that article is very well-sourced (75 linked sources!) so you can read right up.

Now, it could fairly be said that his pro-KKK arguments were more "glib humor" than endorsement and I'd agree. I would also say it's part of the pattern of negative workplace behavior that got him terminated.

In a larger sense, its these "oh, [group A] isn't performing as well as [group B]... must be biological differences" arguments that often form the faux-scientific basis for discrimination. Read any racist literature, and you will find a lot of "science" claiming that [insert racial group] here is biologically inferior. And, yes, that includes much Nazi propaganda.... justifications used by American slave-owners, etc.

Just reading the section you linked, it sounds like he's autistic, not racist. If you didn't know that "Grand Dragon" and "Imperial Wizard" were KKK titles, you'd probably think they were cool - or at least that some nerds would think they were cool.

Hell, those titles being cool without their association to the KKK is why the KKK used those titles.

    So it seems that "white supremacy" is a catchall 
    term for anything that argues a biological basis 
    for group differences.

(I think you're being disingenuous but I'll play along!)

No, not quite.

It's just that their history is inextricably linked.

We can all agree that there is certainly much valid research to be done here. For example, why is sickle-cell anemia so much more prevalent in African-Americans? What biological adaptations allow some populations (Nepalese, etc) to thrive at high altitudes? Nobody finds that sort of thing objectionable.

However, things get ugly fast when we start talking about the study of why one group is best suited for one task or another, or which group is superior in general.

There is a long and sordid history of biological arguments in favor of the superiority of certain groups of people, typically white European males. It should not surprise you to learn that these arguments come from white European males.

Not all studies of "group differences" have anything to do with white supremacy, but every white supremacy movement that has ever existed has claimed a biological basis for their views.

We sort of fought a world war over this (among other reasons) and a lot of people died. These sorts of arguments have also been used to justify slave ownership (a rather large war was fought over this as well) and the oppression of women.

I'm not sure if you're joking, but white supremacy has a long history and is extremely well documented.

Wikipedia is a reasonable place to start

Provide quotes. Name the website. Otherwise you’re convincing nobody.

Wayback link to the "official fundraiser":

https://web.archive.org/web/20170808155320/https://www.wesea...

Wayback link to front page of the site at the time:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170808121314/https://www.wesea...

Characterizations of the site: https://www.splcenter.org/splc-lists-wesearchr-white-nationa...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/24/wesearchr-charles-johnson-al...

Alt right is a branding of "white nationalism":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

> Like that ex-Googler who got fired for repeatedly claiming that women were inferior engineers.

Who? Please provide quotes to support your case if you’re thinking of the most famous example because I don’t recall any such argument. It was all about interests, not capacities.

Sure, here's his original essay.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809220001/https://diversity...

All the essay shows is that your representation of his beliefs is obviously false.

Damore's essay seems to be a kind of Rorschach test. People sympathetic to Damore's views (or at least, to his approach to debate) seem to trust that he's arguing in good faith. People strongly opposed to his views seem to think he's being disingenuous.

Since Damore explicitly said that he thought that the women working at Google had passed the same bar as the men, and hence are all qualified to be there, anyone who say "Damore wanted women to get paid less" or "Damore wanted women to get fired from Google" or anything like that just didn't read the words. They might have read the memo, but not the words, they saw that some of the things he said resembled alt-right talking points and then assumed that he had all the normal alt-right beliefs.

Note that I still think there are some questionable things in the memo, but the way people demonize it shows that they can't read controversial texts or didn't read it and just relied on second hand information from those who can't read controversial texts.

If those are my choices, I'd place myself in the "sympathetic with his approach to debate" bucket.

Feel free to add to the list of choices. I didn't mean to create a false dichotomy.

Also known as a scissor statement [0]

0: (posted here regularly) https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/