Worth noting the first couple outlets (Vice, Gizmodo) did not post the full memo when they dropped the story.
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?
>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.
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?)
1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...
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.
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?
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.
It also concedes that "The New York Times" cannot be trusted to value that kind of discourse more than gotcha narrative chasing.
The term for this environment is "safe space", but they're unpopular for some reason.
I suspect that a healthy society needs both kinds of safe spaces.
I sure as hell don't write screeds at work, only design docs that would be completely uninteresting to national media.
He published under his real name, at work.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
* 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
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.
He wanted a big reaction. He got it. He didn't get the outcome he wanted, but that was never his to control.
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.
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...
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.
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/
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"?
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.
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-...
It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.
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.
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")