He failed the green eggs and ham test for written communication at work.

>Would you like this in the press?

>Would you like this at Brand X?

>Like to read it on the stand?

>Like it in the government's hand?

https://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2006/12/over_at_white_...

I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.

That's not the only issue. Taking away the political content entirely, storing up all your greivances and airing them in a single document intended to attack the entire purpose of other teams was a stupid thing to do. I've seen people do the same thing with technical issues and it's just totally counter-productive.

That's not fair summary of the document at all. In fact Damore was aligned with the purpose of the diversity groups and trying to reason how what is known about different preferences and personalities between men and women could be used to help improve diversity at Google.

For example, Damore's memo has a section where he reasons that one reason women may not be promoted as often is because Google is organized to recognize and reward individual accomplishments rather than participation in groups. Damore theorizes based on cited research that women may be more inclined to contribute in group based settings rather than all alone, and so perhaps aligning promotion to recognize group contributions too would help diversity.

> Damore was aligned with the purpose of the diversity groups

I'm curious your source on this information.

Yup. Like waterfall and agile; it works better to go one-smallest-chunk at a time.

I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.

I think the most that can be said is that is that it is uncertain the degree of influence these (well supported) sex differences in general temperament and preferences have on the specific jobs of software engineering and tech leadership.

However, just because the science is not settled on the subject does not mean one cannot put forth a reasonable hypothesis.

And for the record, the idea that these sex differences have no influence on inclinations towards these specific jobs is also a hypothesis.

Damore may be wrong about the nature of that influence, but I think most people would be surprised if the "no influence" hypothesis was true.

I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.

This article cites two of them and goes into some of the places where Damore made unjustified leaps in logic.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

Here is another that is more detailed but doesn't talk mention individual scientist opinions

https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-r...

Note that your second link says that Damore's claims were basically correct, modulo a few quibbles. Which is almost beside the point. The whole issue demonstrated a failure at every level of society and corporate leadership.

I read through the first article.

>Damore’s assertion that men and women think different is actually pretty uncontroversial, and he cites a paper to back it up, from a team led by David Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and director of the International Sexuality Description Project. The 2008 article, “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures,” does indeed seem to show that women rate higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness

Good. Wired article agrees women rate higher on neroticism.

> The first-order criticism here is easy: Damore oversells the difference cited in the paper. As Schmitt tells WIRED via email, “These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.” The other 90 percent, in other words, are the result of individual variation, environment, and upbringing.

In Damore's memo, on the subject of trait differences between men and women Damore writes:

"I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."

This is written right under an illustration of two overlapping bell curves with one curve shifted slightly to the right as an example of the overlap he is talking about. It's hard for me to take anyone as honest interlocutor if they are interpreting this as "overselling the difference" as the Wired author does.

On the subject of whether the differences are biological or cultural, Damore cites the fact that trait differences are consistent across cultures and that they are linked to prenatal hormones and heredity, among other points. Perhaps the extent to which trait differences are cultural or genetic is more debatable, but it is beside the point of Damore's essay. Whether trait differences are biological or cultural, Google still acts within a context that they exist . Damore's argument does not hinge on the differences being genetic.

Wired writes:

>Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt’s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn’t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. “It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),” writes Schmitt. So, yes, that’s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore.

The researcher is saying that it is unclear to him if neuroticism would play a role in Google employment. That is not exactly disagreement, more the researcher saying he doesn't know. Damore is actually in a better position to judge than the researcher as Damore is not only aware of the research, but also employment practices at Google.

Furthermore, the researcher isn't calling this an unjustified leap in logic or disputing Damore's evidence or interpretation of the facts, just the conclusion. That's perfectly fair, but it isn't fair to take a point like "It isn't clear to me if neuroticism affects Google employment" and act like that is a rejection of the Damore memo. The conclusion isn't clear to one researcher.

Wired:

>In general, he notes, women prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things—the implication being that Google is a more thing-oriented workplace, so it just makes sense that fewer women would want to work there. Again, the central assertion here is fairly uncontroversial. “On average—and I emphasize that, on average—men are more interested in thing-oriented occupations and fields, and that difference is actually quite large,” says Richard Lippa, a psychologist at Cal State Fullerton and another of the researchers who Damore cites.

Again, the researcher and the Wired author admit Damore has the right science and shrug at the question of whether the science can be applied to Google. As before, the researcher is not rejecting the conclusion and is not claiming Damore misrepresents the facts. The researcher is saying that they do not know if the conclusion can be reached.

Damore lists "pre-natal testosterone" as a biological cause of sex trait differences and then links those differences to different career preferences. Wired writes:

"Still, most hormone researchers agree that these differences are real. But that they’re directly linked to prenatal testosterone? Not so much. And to differences in career choice? “There’s 100 percent no consensus on that,” says Justin Carré, a psychologist at Nipissing University in Ontario. “The human literature on early androgen exposure is really very messy.”"

Again, there is conflicting literature and evidence and the point is debated, but what the "actual researcher" says is not "Damore made an unjustified leap in logic" but rather, "There's 100 percent no consensus on that".

That's it as far as scientists responding to Damore goes - or perhaps I missed something more substantive?

Psychology is barely science in the first place, so I don't see why Damore's interpretation is any less valid than an author's.

If you can't reproduce the results consistently, it's not science. Results in psychology are very frequently not reproducible.

The real error Damore made is buying into the idea that studies in psychology can really tell us useful info at all.

Thank you, that's an awesome tidbit

Sued them for what, exactly? Quoting a document Damore circulated to thousands of people? Being honest isn't generally a crime.

I'll note that you've just imagined the "intention of destroying a person's life" bit. There were plenty of reasons for releasing that that have nothing to do with Damore. Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.

> Indeed, why would they have anticipated that it would lead to Damore's firing? If that was obvious, then that would have been obvious to Damore when he wrote it.

Not sure I agree. There is no big tech corporation in current America where having your name tied to a memo like that won't destroy your career within the company l.

Damore certainly should have expected that if leadership disagreed with him, he was in for a bad time. However, he still is within reasonable bounds to go after whoever leaked the internal memo externally regardless of whether or not you agree with the content.

Go after them for what? In America, you can't just sue people for "you told the truth" or "my own words made me look bad and its your fault".

In America you can sue anyone for anything at any time. Whether you will win or not is another matter, but if you've never been to jury duty the court system is absolutely packed with cases that seem absurd. In this instance, it would be perfectly plausible to sue for something like emotional distress.

One can file a case, sure. But even to get to discovery, let alone trial, the suit has to be about something for which one can actually sue. Emotional distress can be a factor in damages, but a judge would instantly throw out a case whose only basis was, "The bad man hurt my feelings."

If people here are just saying Damore should just harass people by file frivolous lawsuits that will quickly be thrown out, then fine, let them say that. But the theory that there's legitimate grounds for a lawsuit that could actually succeed is ridiculous.

There is no way a lawsuit like this would survive a motion to dismiss. Intentional infliction of emotional distress requires an underlying wrongdoing, among other things. There was no legal wrong committed when the document was leaked.

Are you a lawyer by chance? In California, infliction of emotional distress in a jury trial requires things that are plausible in this case. See CACI No. 1600, especially the OR section of #2 [1]. I am very skeptical that such a case would actually be dismissed rather than go to trial. I was a juror on a trial with similar grounds a few years ago. Perhaps you've seen something in the handling of such cases that I haven't.

[1] https://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/1600/1600...

Did you read that? In particular, see the Hughes vs Pair quote:

"A cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress exists when there is ‘(1) extreme and outrageous conduct by the defendant with the intention of causing, or reckless disregard of the probability of causing, emotional distress; (2) the plaintiff’s suffering severe or extreme emotional distress; and (3) actual and proximate causation of the emotional distress by the defendant’s outrageous conduct.’ A defendant’s conduct is ‘outrageous’ when it is so ‘extreme as to exceed all bounds of that usually tolerated in a civilized community.’ And the defendant’s conduct must be ‘intended to inflict injury or engaged in with the realization that injury will result.'"

Quoting somebody's actual words is in no way "outrageous" under that standard. People in civilized communities quote what other people say all the time. And even if the didn't, the first amendment strongly protects political speech, and quoting somebody else's political speech is pretty obviously part of that.

So I'm guessing you're not a lawyer then and just enjoy talking about things with authority on HN as though you are an expert. I'm disappointed yet again, but not surprised since that seems to be the norm here. Please stop doing that - it makes this community worse.

Yes, I did read it, thanks for being condescending and violating HN guidelines. As I said already, I sat on the jury for a similar case that did go to trial in California so your rationale for thinking this wouldn't doesn't make sense to me and seems based on no actual experience. This is not an instance of someone simply quoting another person - the individual who posted the memo online did so deliberately to cause harm and bring unwanted media attention and public hatred toward another individual, which pretty much ruined his life. Further, your focus on the "outrageous" portion only shows you're cherry picking what you want this particular tort to say rather than the whole definition. So yes, it is reckless disregard under that standard and any lawyer could probably bring it to trial if they so desired. Whether the jury would find the tweeter guilty or not is another matter.

You have absolutely no idea what the intent of the person posting was. None. You are making things up to suit your position.

You having sat one one whole jury does not make you an expert in this topic.

I am not "cherry picking". I quoted the whole standard. It has three parts. I pointed to the part that in my view clearly does not apply. If you think it does apply, feel free to argue it. But standing on your expertise of being in the same room with lawyers once does not cut it for me.

There are multiple prongs to the tort and all of them have to be fulfilled. A reasonable jury cannot conclude that leaking the memo to the media is outrageous conduct beyond all the standards of civilised society. It no longer matters if the defendant acted intentionally; the claim fails and must be dismissed.

.. so you'd destroy their life instead?

Outcomes like this inevitable when capital has a concentration of power and labor is not organized.

Damore is a self-described classic liberal so I assume he’s fine with this arrangement.

Always assume that what you say could be on the front page of the New York Times.

And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.

Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.

What percentage of people publicly criticizing the memo and attacking Damore do you think actually read it in full?

Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.

How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?

I'll also suggest, reading this memo was incredibly painful for many of my female colleagues and friends inside and outside of Google. I don't think they should have to read the entire thing carefully in order to have an opinion on it. Indeed, I am not a well-read expert in many schools of thought that I nonetheless object to.

> Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.

OP's claim was that this was intentional with the goal of creating sensational clickbait. I guess the idea is, the full memo was tamer and, had it not been excerpted, people would not have reacted as strongly.

Do you agree with this?

Yes of course if it had not been excerpted and retitled as "Anti-diversity memo", people would have been less primed to have a knee jerk reaction, or to even click the link in the first place.

>How does the fact that people criticized the memo without reading it in full speak to OP's point about the memo having been taken out of context?

Because you can't begin to know what someone meant unless you read what they wrote.

OK, if I'm understanding this right, the argument is that because the document was not initially printed in full (i.e. with figures and citations) in the press (and had inflammatory headlines), many people got the wrong impression about it.

That seems like a testable hypothesis.

1. If it were true, I'd expect a significantly higher proportion of Googlers to be on his side than the proportion non-Googlers, since all Googlers had access to the full memo. Is that true?

2. If it were true, I'd expect a significant number of people who ended up reading the whole memo to say, I initially had a negative reaction, but after seeing X specific figure or citation, I changed my mind. Has anyone in this thread said that? If not, why not?

(Is your feeling that first impressions are everything, and after that, people's views are ossified past the point of being able to change?)

Probably as high a percentage as his supporters. Trying to deflect criticism by saying people hadn’t read it was a common way to avoid critically thinking about it, and it became comical when people were making very specific comments which clearly indicated familiarity. I remember someone writing a very detailed critique of the way it was oversold it as based on science despite misrepresenting the scientific consensus[1], and even then you could easily find people saying that the reason she didn’t agree with him was that she hadn’t read it or that buzzfeed published the text first without charts, even when she was discussing the original studies he was claiming as support.

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...

The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.

And to you this constitutes reporting that was "purposefully out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade"?

Well I wouldn't put it that strongly (I didn't write the post you're quoting), but it hardly demonstrates journalistic integrity. (But then what would you expect from a site that's just Gawker rebranded?)

For an example of "reporting" that comes closer to what you describe in your quote, I'd point to the pile of hot garbage that former Google exec (and deranged lunatic) Yonatan Zunger posted on Medium.com, which was very widely shared and cited in the weeks following Damoregate.

Suppose we had data that we agreed was reliable showing that women software engineers who had read Damore's memo and Yonatan's post would overwhelmingly be unwilling to work with Damore and overwhelmingly be willing to work with Yonatan.

I'm not saying I have this data, but just hypothetically, suppose we did.

Would this at all influence your judgements (e.g. "deranged lunatic") of them? Why or why not?

Yes, it would. I'm not sure what you think you're arguing against - all I said was that Gizmodo stripped out the citations from Damore's memo.

As for Yonatan, if you don't believe he's a deranged lunatic go read the insane diatribes he was posting in 2017 about how Trump is literally Hitler and that Muslims and Latinos needed to flee the country as soon as possible for their own safety. The man is detached from reality. It disturbs me that someone so psychotic was able to occupy a senior position at Google.

The memo was, but very few people read that and instead read what was spoon fed to them by their ideological rag of choice. Look how many comments on this HN post alone claim he said things he didn’t (the google women engineers were worse, women can’t code, all women are neurotic, etc).

I'll point out that this aphorism concedes that certain categories of interesting discussion are not possible, and it's a little neutral about that prospect for my taste.

It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.

All sorts of discussion aren't possible unless the participants can be sure that the others are acting in good faith and not likely to engage in needless hostility or reprisals outside the discussion.

The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.

I would rephrase that to say that "safe space" should be the term for such environments, but in practice that's problematic. The term was specifically invented to describe spaces where certain discussions are forbidden because they could be "triggering". It was not invented to describe a space where discussion is possible without unilateral escalation to unrelated third parties.

I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.

No, “safe space” has long been taken over to indicate spaces where people can be without worrying about being exposed to an idea that triggers a sensitive area for them regardless of intent or good faith.

This is literally part of Noogler orientation at Google, word for word, and I'm sure at many other companies too.

I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.

Hopefully every other part of your online life is under a difficult to guess pseudonym if you write anything even remotely controversial, because the social justice mob is only looking for scalps, not justice.

Not sure how that's relevant here.

He published under his real name, at work.

Maybe the lesson here, then, is "If a company really wants honest discussion of controversial ideas, they should provide a means for people to carry out those discussions with anonymity."

A similar thing happened at a company I worked for, where the new COO wanted to make a name for himself by creating an "ask the CEO" email address which any employee could write a question to. Answers would then be shared (anonymously) with the whole company each week at a regular "town hall" meeting.

Seeing the potential for the company to abuse this medium, I stayed late one night and whipped up a web page on a dev server which allowed people to write questions without giving their name or email address, and the page would then use a generic account to forward the question to the "ask the CEO" address.

A spark of wisdom in my mind did prompt me to personally email the COO first with a link to this site, asking for permission, but after 24 hours passed without a reply, I decided to send the link out to everyone in the company...

Shortly after that, a friendly colleague from the Ops team informed me that his boss (who saw himself as the enforcer of company discipline) had demanded that the dev server hosting the website be shut down and my access revoked. I took the hint and moved the files on the server so that the link 404'ed.

From the tech support emails I received after that, it seemed that there were at least a few colleagues that were interested in making use of my anonymisation service. The COO did eventually email back with a short reply along the lines of "This wasn't what I was expecting", and later, at the next town hall meeting, he explained that his belief in "transparency" meant that the company was prepared to answer questions, but equally meant that they demanded to know the identities of the questioners.

From your story it sounds like you already know this, but most companies really do not want broad discussions of controversial ideas, especially not ones entirely outside the remit of the employees participating in them.

Engineering is where most of the people go who care more about being right than about what people think of them. There is a reason for that - it usually matters if an approach is right or not in engineering work. Companies like Google need to be able to roll their eyes when engineers start stupid arguments, not sack them. The front-page rule is a technical impediment to people being able to figure out facts. The path to the truth often leads through patches of believing things that are wrong.

Charging into a room trying to start an argument isn't the best way to work out what is true; but there are young engineers who are going to try it because they are under a lot of pressure to be technically correct and not under a lot of pressure to be socially savvy. They're in the process of learning that it isn't politically feasible.

Even a full blown "Engineer holds crackpot opinion!" should never be front page news unless it is a risk of a building fallen down. Let alone "Young Engineer tries to start a Stupid Argument".

This wasn't emacs vs vi.

Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way.

Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his own time. But what he was doing was vigorous workplace activism. Activism that not only contradicted the goals of Google execs and the bulk of its employees, but was carried out in a way that actively damaged ongoing Google efforts and caused a significant workplace disruption.

You could argue that Google's management made a mistake in allowing a young engineer this much power in the first place. Or by not reining him in earlier. But rolling their eyes was never an option here because Damore was having a significant negative effect on the company.

Google solicited the feedback. This is the problem: companies want it both ways. An open culture where people tell the truth about what they think (so that you don't get the brilliantly dysfunctional organizations that suck up huge amounts of money in lost efficiency) but none of the messy discomfort that comes from people actually disagreeing in an open society.

I've never worked at Google, so I can't say for sure. But from what I hear, there's plenty of disagreement. And Google may have generally asked for feedback. But I'm pretty sure they didn't say, "Hey, James, could you write a maximally divisive political opinion piece attacking a bunch of important internal efforts and implying that anybody who doesn't agree with you is just a villain in an Ayn Rand novel?"

They said "please share your opinion on this specific topic [the low proportion of women in engineering]." Regardless of how you color his response, they asked for exactly what he gave.

(I worked at Google at the time)

This is false.

Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.

It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.

The feedback solicitation was in regard to a diversity seminar which James attended. The document was initially provided to HR, but received no response. James waited a month before starting to share it on the discussion forums.

If Google HR was going to have a problem with what he wrote, then mentioning that to him privately when the had the chance would have been the appropriate move. Their initial silence is a big reason for why things turned out the way they did.

Could you point me to your source for that quote?

I'm not coloring his response when I call it a divisive political opinion piece. It's explicitly framed as "the politics of the majority of people at Google is a big problem". And whether or not their initial request technically was broad enough to include his response isn't the issue.

Either Damore was reasonably smart, and he knew that this would at best be enormously divisive. Or maybe he was just incredibly clueless. (Personally I think it was the former.) When bosses (or anybody) ask for something, technically complying with the literal meaning of their words is not enough. One has to consider goals and context, and respond accordingly.

They expressly asked him to share his opinion about an extremely divisive, almost third-rail topic. You're just saying that his statement ended up being divisive as well, but that's tautological. It's simply not possible to be "politically neutral" about such a topic and say anything worthwhile.

Could you please point me to your source for the exact wording of their request?

He was clueless, insofar as he made the mistake of trusting a giant corporation to be a good steward of a political space.

It wasn't a political space. It was a corporate space that Damore used for an explicitly political end.

It was a political space. The topic was literally about gender hiring policies.

To the extent that every space is political, sure. But it's not like Google had declared themselves steward of a space devoted to political discussions. They're a business. Employees at work should keep in mind they're at work.

A reply from a throwaway account to this is for some reason dead, but it seems good to me, so I'm pulling it out of the garbage.

---

This is false.

Why are people claiming Google solicited his feedback? Is that how the news was reported? If it was a feedback, it wouldn't have been written in a Google Doc, and shared in an internal mailing list.

It was written during a time when diversity in tech was the topic du jour. The mailing list was for political discussion / unpopular opinions, and was known for heated debates. It didn't draw a lot of discussion at first. A few weeks later, the memo somehow made its way to the internal meme site, where a majority of Googlers frequent. That's how the whole company learned about it and how the issue blew up.

Damore laid out the timeline pretty clearly:

* He attended a voluntary HR run seminar on diversity, and feedback was solicited.

* He wrote the memo and submitted it to HR

* HR sat on the memo without response for a month, after which he started sharing it on some internal mailing lists

In which case, the "request for feedback" bit, which Damore's defenders here are making a big deal about, was irrelevant. Him sharing it internally was not anything people asked for; it was something he decided to do on his own.

One of the criticisms made of Damore when this first broke was "he should have expressed his concerns to HR first". Like pretty much all of the criticisms of Damore, this one was based on ignorance (or a lie). He in fact did initially submit his concerns to HR, and not merely of his own initiative but in response to their request.

If HR had an objection to Damore's memo, the appropriate time to address that would have been when he initially submitted it. They had a whole month to respond before he shared it with other people. They could have had a private conversation with him and resolved any disagreements or misunderstandings without it ever becoming a fiasco. By inviting his comments but then failing to address them, Google HR bears most of the blame for the fallout.

His decision to share the memo with his colleagues was his, sure, but he wrote initially it in response to a request from HR. If management asks for your feedback about something but then ignores it, seeking validation from your colleagues is a perfectly logical next step. Especially so at a place like Google, where open discussion was supposed to be a hallmark of it's internal culture.

One, we don't know that he submitted this to HR. Two, even if he did, they had no obligation to reply, let alone within a month. Three, we do not know that they didn't reply. Four, whether or not they did, it was his decision to publish broadly; he is responsible for his own actions. Five, after he received negative feedback, he just adjusted it slightly and kept going (and in fact kept going until he dropped this suit.). And six, he knew or should have known that an explicitly political attack on Google's culture and D&I practices was not the average thing you might pass along for feedback.

He wanted a big reaction. He got it. He didn't get the outcome he wanted, but that was never his to control.

If you think he's lying about the sequence of events, that's your choice. But unless you have a better reason than that you disagree with his opinions, you're not going to convince anyone.

Is it not the job of HR to address employee concerns? Is it not the job of HR to manage the liability incurred by employees? I fail to see how HR does not bear responsibility here. Had HR said "sharing the contents of the memo at work will get you fired" then whether he shared the memo or not at least he would know what to expect. However, it's pretty clear that at most he expected a heated discussion, not termination.

And he did not publish it "broadly". He posted it to some sort of internal "skeptics" discussion group. The idea being that this would be the normal venue for employees to discuss controversial ideas in good faith and with an open mind. It was others who published it "broadly".

Damore's disagreement (which was not even necessarily a disagreement about values, but about facts and policy) was not an attack. The failure to make that distinction on the part of Google leadership and the media is why this became such a big issue, nor was this failing Damore's fault. Fortunately, it seems that most people (if not necessarily the loudest people) are able to make that distinction.

I don't think he has to be lying. I think we've only heard one side of the story.

It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.

The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.

If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received. And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war. Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/09/james-dam...

> I don't think he has to be lying. I think we've only heard one side of the story.

A reasonable question I suppose, but fruitless as no-one has contradicted his timeline of events.

> It's the job of employees to manage their own behavior. It's HR's job to do their best to contain the problems when employees fail to do that.

You have yet to make the case that Damore's behavior was somehow irresponsible. On the other hand, an HR department doesn't respond to employee concerns and that only deals with the fallout of situations after they occur is not very effective or responsible.

> The dude created a go link, the purpose of which is to make something available to the entire company. Publishing it into an open internal group fits my definition of "broadly". It's not like he handed it to his manager or a couple colleagues and said "I'd like your feedback on this." He intentionally put it out to a wide audience.

Access control restrictions are not particularly relevant. He did, iirc, solicit feedback from some select colleagues before publishing it internally. He also submitted his concerns to HR (unless you've forgotten). After that, he shared it with an internal forum devoted to discussing controversial ideas. What else should he have done?

> If you don't see it as an attack, I guess that's your prerogative. That's certainly how it was received.

By some, certainly not all.

> And given that the go link was titled pc-considered-harmful, it's clear that Damore saw it as a shot in the broader culture war.

Please explain how criticism political correctness amounts to an attack. Arguing that "political correctness is something only bad people complain about" is not sufficient. Feel free to include anything within the actual contents of the essay that also amounts to an "attack".

> Something confirmed by his post-firing behavior, where the first people he talked to were strident antifeminists

This whole "guilt-by-association" is very tiresome and low-effort. All the moreso considering that it was quite evident that "acceptable" media sources were never going to give Damore a fair shake, nor were they particularly interested in what he actually had to say.

It's not fruitless to point out that we shouldn't jump to conclusions based on only knowing one side of a story.

As to "what else should he have done", assuming that he really was trying to help with something totally outside his professional expertise and personal experience, I think a good start would have been understanding the topic on more than a superficial level before charging in to say they so blinded by their biases that they were doing it all wrong. That's not the way to get anything done anywhere. Taking a few classes in relevant topics would have been a great start. He also should have aggressively depoliticized his document.

And then if he were really serious about making change in an organization that size on such a big topic, he should have spent a lot of time getting to know the people involved, socializing his ideas, and learning how to pitch them in a way they could be heard. That's how most things get done in large companies when one isn't a high-level executive.

I'm glad we both now agree that he published it internally. Thanks.

If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.

And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence. So is his choice of a right wing lawyer. So is his lawsuit that conservative white men were being discriminated against at Google.

There's also the lack of him doing anything particularly indicative in the other direction. If his goal was really to improve things for women, as has been claimed, he's had years to take action. Or just to write new pieces.

I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling. He's obviously smart, so it would be weird to think somebody normally as precise as a Google engineer was just suddenly very sloppy. Instead I assume he wrote what he meant to write and upset the people he wanted to upset. Apparently he thought he'd somehow win the day, but that's not the first time an engineer would have arrogantly leapt in to something thinking they had solved it all. Or, for that matter, somebody with a physics degree: https://xkcd.com/793/

> If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.

I am both a native English speaker and familiar with the term "political correctness", which actually was coined by the left. Suffice to say, there are those across the political spectrum who believe that it is possible to criticize political correctness as a pattern of behavior, without attacking the identity of the people whom political correctness was intended to protect.

> And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence.

If the only behavioral evidence that you choose to look at is who he associated with, then "guilt by association" describes precisely what you are doing. Did you even watch those interviews? Or any of his other public appearances?

Also, the article you linked to is very telling. It mentions all of these horrible attributes about Molyneux and Peterson, without noting (for instance) that Dr. Peterson is also a subject matter expert in the fields of psychometrics and psychology of personality (his research is highly cited) and who had a business using psychological profiling to aid businesses in hiring decisions. That sounds exactly like the kind of person that ought to have some interesting insights on Damore's memo. Yet his only salient quality to you is that he's "antifeminist"?

> I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling.

Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?

The term "political correctness" has been primarily a right-wing attack for decades: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-political...

If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.

> If the only behavioral evidence that you

I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.

Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd. Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research. He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.

> Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?

It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse, as demonstrated by their lining up behind a guy who publicly muses about injecting bleach. The kind of conservatism I'm most comfortable with is of the small-business-oriented, Rockefeller-Republican sort, now basically extinct. I frequently appreciate the principled stand of Amash, even though I disagree with the bulk of his actual positions. I regularly see pieces in American Conservative that are sensible and well-reasoned, although I often don't end up agreeing. And I'm a big fan of being conservative in the sense used in engineering or accountancy, but again, being prudent, modest, and careful are anathema to most of the US right these days. And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.

> If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.

That the modern usage has a negative connotation, and even is sometimes invoked as a slur, does not mean it is not used to describe a real phenomenon[1]. To put it simply, political correctness is the censure or censorship of speech not primarily because of it's truth (or lack thereof) but because of the perceived harm such speech does to disadvantaged groups. Whether this leads to the suppression of important truth, and whether that suppression actually benefits the disadvantaged, is very reasonably up for debate.

> I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.

I will concede you made other (weak) arguments regarding behavior, but I will amend my point here to say that the fact that you treat those associations as evidence, particularly without providing any connection to the content of the interviews themselves, to be a rather clear example of "guilt by association" whether you intend that or not. Being interviewed by Stefan Molyneux no more makes Damore a white supremacist than being interviewed by Joe Rogan makes him a stoner or being interviewed by Dave Rubin makes him gay. Damore chose his interviews because he was being viciously smeared in the media and these were people who had a large audience and were willing to give him a fair shake. Similar reasons can established for his legal representation.

Also, as a purely tactical matter, to the people who find Damore's memo itself persuasive (or even those who just didn't find it immediately offensive) this kind of argument comes across as being in bad faith. It seems like a way to disqualify Damore without having to engage with his arguments directly.

> Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd.

I never said anything about neutral. He is however, uncontestably an expert in the relevant science. Of course, there are other experts, and they don't all share the same perspective, but if anyone were in a position to correct Damore for being radically off in his representation of the scientific literature Peterson would be a fine choice. The fact that he (among others) thinks Damore does a fine job in representing the literature (for a lay person) means that at the very least the science is not so settled against Damore as many would have you believe.

> Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research.

He actually had quite a big audience for his psychology lectures before any of the political stuff happened. You should check out the series on personality, it's really quite interesting.

> He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.

Dismissing Peterson's scientific credentials is one kind of wrong. Thinking he is alt-right is quite another. To the extent that he is on the right, he's quite mainstream politically. To understand what the alt-right actually is, I recommend The New Right by Michael Malice[2]. It's very good journalism that is both fair and (at times) highly critical.

> It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse...And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.

I appreciate the examples you give in this paragraph. While it was within the parameters of the question I had asked, I was kind of hoping you had specific examples of conservative thought on the issues touched on in Damore's memo. You mention the American Conservative, what do you think of this article from them on the memo[3]?

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-per... (full disclosure, Jordan Peterson was a co-author on the research cited)

[2]https://www.amazon.com/New-Right-Journey-American-Politics/d...

[3]https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/james-damore-...

Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot.

It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.

The go link for his memo was "pc-considered-harmful". PC. You know what that stands for, right? Even he knew he was doing political activism.

In general, that is how Google responds to bad ideas.

When the memo hit the public, it became an issue of whether the company was perceived to be supporting a Title VII violation. Then the company doesn't have the option of rolling their eyes and going about business as usual anymore.

Consider the recent kerkuffle with the CEO of Away. She didn't tread on any political or cultural landmines. Just decided to treat her workers like shit and do it on open Slack channels.

While this is a good advice, it is a terrible response after the fact.

Indeed. Never assume that anything you write at work on a work computer won't be seen by your manager or used against you. Even if it's supposedly confidential correspondence with HR or protected labour organisation, and theoretically illegal for them to access. Even if it's personal info under GDPR.

And especially not if you post it to a huge internal mailing list.

(I'm also curious as to what the overlap is between believers in "at-will firing is great and there should be no notice requirements on employers" and "Damore should have had far more process before being fired")

Publishing to that many people and expecting it to remain private is folly of such a high kind that it borders on stupidity.

I do not think that all feedback ever sent to the google diversity team had been made public.

Also, he shared his memo with HR (at their request) long before he shared it with his colleagues. If Google was going to have an objection to what he wrote, that would have been the appropriate time.

That’s like suing people for telling others that you’re gay. That’s a standard of liability people would never rally behind, one which prevents you from speaking truthfully at the cost of another person.

Not quite. He didn't write the memo to say he's a misogynist or a political conservative. He wrote a memo implying the women who worked with him may not be as competent as the men.

Now replace "women" with any other group, such as people of color, Jews, armed forces veterans or Republicans, and see how it goes.

I am afraid what he was saying was that the current policy for attracting women to tech might be inefficient. He also proposed a bunch of policies that might make tech more attractive to women.

It's fine to disagree with him, it's not to missrepresent what he said.

It's perfectly fine to misrepresent what he said - consider that about 50% of the commenters in this entire thread so just that with no repercussions.

No such memo exists. Why would you make that up?

I’m talking about the liability of somebody sitting in the same context, wanting to talk about it.

If someone distributes a memo that's likely to alienate half of their colleagues, the first thing I'll question is their lack of judgement.

If he was uncertain about hiring policies and thought those were negatively affecting productivity, he should have taken the question to his manager or to HR, along with some evidence.

I’m talking about the liability of people sitting in the same context. Are you still talking about what James should or shouldn’t be doing? I’m talking about whether you should incur legal risk for leaking facts about people likes James.

If he wrote that on a memo and distributed it to a dozen colleagues, it's doubtfully a secret. If he were fired for being gay, that'd be against the law on pretty much every civilized country and a couple that wouldn't qualify.

You two are having very different arguments.

> If I were him, I would have personally sued the person that leaked the content and continued the fight until they had no money left. They really need to be taught a lesson that it's not okay to do something like this with the intention of destroying a person's life.

This is the original post I'm responding to. If I found an old blog post of yours which revealed life-altering information, should I be sued if I send it to a reporter?

You shouldn't make extreme claims about what other people supposedly said without showing evidence.

Damore was character assassinated via leaks and libel, yes. Pragmatically, he could have prevented his fate if he took the opportunity to back down when challenged by corporate, instead of defending his right to free honest speech at a megacorp. He erroneously thought that because controversial party-line free-speech was job-safe even when intellectually dishonest, that controversial anti-party-line free speech was also job-safe.

The character assassination weapon was his own memo and opinions, stated over and over by himself.

It's character suicide.

except for the fact that almost all controversial statements attributed to the memo are projections.

In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.

That would have been a great thing for the memo to say.

That's not what the memo said. Instead, the memo claimed women were on average more neurotic.

Neuroticism is is a personality trait, others are Obsessionality, Psychoticism, Disinhibition, Impulsivity, Rigidity, Alexithymia, Perfectionism, Sensory processing sensitivity, Novelty seeking, Harm avoidance, Self-esteem, Honesty-humility, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience.

I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other.

Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse.

The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender.

We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.

> The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender.

That's two paragraphs of the memo in the middle and the bit at the end. Most of the memo is setting up a case for fundamental differences in gender, strawman depictions of the "morality of Google," a claim that men have a higher drive for status (which is, fundamentally, the sort of thing that a company would be put immediately in violation of Title VII if it agreed with), and a claim that Google's anti-discriminatory practices are discriminatory.

The repeated false claims about statements in the memo and abbreviated versions shared don't count as character assassination?