Re: Damore, I agree. He was pushing a bad agenda that tried to draw more than is reasonable from some academic research on gender disparity.
Very, very similar to what Gebru did as well. First by pushing agendas in a publication leading to its disapproval, then in her follow up email.
The direct quote (which can be read in the link [0]) is:
> “What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference.”
This is a direct, explicit, unequivocal reference to researchers and ethicists employed by Google to write research and policy documents on fairness, DE&I, and bias, within machine learning, staffing and hiring, and other areas.
The phrase, “stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference,” cannot be falsely made to apply to any context other than actively encouraging coworkers to specifically stop performing their direct job responsibilities.
My suspicion is that you would try to falsely misrepresent Timnit’s imploring to stop work as instead being about some type of non-work related activities or optional / extra-curricular activities that Google wouldn’t have a formal labor productivity stake in - and if that is in fact what your response would be, it is completely and wholly false and wrong.
[0]: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...
In poker terms: one party bluffed and the other party called the bluff.
Now whether the clauses were abusive and the company was compelled to satisfy these conditions is left to lawyers, I suppose. I'm not privy to more details to have an opinion one way or the other.
The job is to increase diversity and inclusion, not to write documents. Programmers get this in other domains (the job isn’t to write lines of code, but to provide value to customers), but suddenly become naive when it comes to things like this.
Damore said more than just that there might be reasons for the lack of women in tech. He also said that we should stop trying to increase their representation. Among a bunch of other things.