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The author's arguments have been completely misrepresented. He pointed out widely-believed and sometimes scientifically-established differences in the DISTRIBUT

• deleted 9y ago
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• futun 9y ago
  Mod parent up * 10^6
• jasonwatkinspdx 9y ago
  > Everyone is just rushing to virtue signal, to demonstrate their own purity of thought. They've just proved the author's point. Can you support this beyond being your own judgemental assumption? Assuming everyone that disagrees with you is acting in bad faith isn't reasonable.
  • marcoperaza 9y ago
    It is my social commentary, based on the fact-free and argument-free disavowals of the author's memo, not as wrong but as morally intolerable. CNN.com's headline article yesterday was something about him having said "women are biologically unfit for technology jobs" which is a malicious and willful misreading meant to give basis for the moral panic around the memo.
• onli 9y ago
  I got people in my circle that seriously called for him to be fired. People I know as being intelligent, even a university professor. Either those people are more warped than I have ever known, and you are right about the dogma. Or they did not read the memo. It is really shocking to see the misrepresentation of the intent of the memo. I normally stay out of discussion about those topics, it's too dangerous - but that development is just unacceptable.
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  • gnahckire 9y ago
    Ugh, I did the same thing. Similar results. This is something I feel that he genuinely wanted to discuss and was open to changing his opinion given that his assumptions/research was challenged. This unfortunately didn't happen.
  • ubernostrum 9y ago
    It's very simple: if you believe that others' fitness or qualification for their jobs, based on flimsy (at best) evo-psych arguments, is a topic that you can legitimately put forward for public debate and discussion, then I believe your fitness or qualification for your job, based on whatever I pull out of my ass, is a topic that can legitimately be put forward for public debate and discussion. In other words: don't dish it out if you can't take it.
    • onli 9y ago
      I think the spirit of the memo even in that section is perfectly acceptable. > Note, 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. It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.
• daemonk 9y ago
  Did he actually cite any scientific literature? I would be interested in reading them. If not, then they are just intelligently dressed up assumptions.
  • jimrandomh 9y ago
    Yes, it had lots of citations. Gizmodo stripped out all the links when it posted it, though, because insane shouting matches are more profitable to Gizmodo than discussion.
• pcurve 9y ago
  "The reaction to the memo is really the most damning thing about the whole affair." I found that aspect troubling too. This isn't a subject I know much about, so I was hoping for more balanced debate from both sides. Instead what we got was internet lynching and grandstanding.
  • kenjackson 9y ago
    In fairness to the internet lynchers -- the distinction between modern day Nazi's and the prose in that memo are pretty subtle. No one is stupid enough to come right out and say that they hate women in the workplace, yet I've worked with people who have told me that before -- yet their public persona looks just like this authors. While you may be legally required to give him the benefit of the doubt -- any person who works with him that gives him that same benefit is probably naïve.
    • dropstickle 9y ago
      Modern day Nazi's may use biological differences as a sort of ideological fuel to further their despicable cause, but to lay that sort of intention behind the memo author is also despicable. The nazis should not be able to deter a society from looking at science from an objective viewpoint, that is something everyone would suffer from.
      • kenjackson 9y ago
        Let's be clear. He isn't doing science. I support research done in a scientific way, but he is cherry picking research to further a political agenda in the workplace. To act like this is science is despicable.
        • dropstickle 9y ago
          As far as I have understood, his main problem with Google is exactly as you describe him. He feels like Google is actively furthering a political agenda, namely the left one, and does not allow any dissidents or diversity of viewpoints. He explictly states that he is not against diversity, and that he is open to criticism and debate of the arguments he presented. As for the cherry picking; remember that he is trying to make a point here, namely that biological differences might play a role over aggregated statistical differences, and that this might be one of the reasons we don't see the 50/50 split, and that ignoring this might be counter productive for everyone. Is the biological studies he have presented cherry picked? I'm sure you have seen the Quillette article [1], and the scientists quoted there does not seem to think so. [1] http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/ http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-....
• elefanten 9y ago
  It's a vast overstatement to say even most of the claims are "well-known and mostly scientifically-established". Honestly, most of the claims are purely asserted. Some consist of wikipedia links or links to random single pieces of research. Those are far cries from the standard you set out. I agree the author should not have their arguments misrepresented. But this applies in both directions.
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• jaredklewis 9y ago
  What are these well known and scientifically-established differences in the distribution of traits between men and women? The research linked in the the document are based on The Big Five Personality Traits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO. Having read Mr. Damore's document, I can find very little in it of substance. It deals with politics and gender in only the very broadest of terms. It does not delve deeply into the scientific issues at hand, instead sprinkling his platitudes with wikipedia links to give them weight. That being said, I completely agree that the US's nasty brand of liberalism is in a sad state. Our response to this manifesto should have been a cold critique of its many flaws, not the blind hysteria we've apparently opted for instead.
  • wahern 9y ago
    These traits are measured with self-report surveys. I.e. personality quizzes. Not to malign the field of psychology, but this isn't the gold standard of science, IMHO. These kinds of flaws permeate every study about discrimination. It's a field of study intrinsically fraught with issues, especially when you move beyond situations of direct discrimination. In any event, let's not forget that sexism isn't merely something that men foist upon women; it's a culture that can be internalized and perpetuated by women, too. Which means that it's easily possible (and almost certainly likely to some extent) that wealthier, more egalitarian societies exhibit more exaggerated gender roles precisely _because_ women, in being able to self-segregate more broadly, are thus empowered to perpetuate culturally defined gender preferences into far reaching corners of society. There was a great article recently about a woman who intentionally wore flowery dresses to the office as an expression of her femininity, in purposeful contravention of what she saw as a culture which forced women to unnecessarily and unfairly adopt more masculine expressions. I think it's fair to say that we'll always have a notion of femininity, and that most women would want it that way. Men may have forced dresses upon women at some point, but in our modern culture, at least for the time being, a dress is one marker of a certain kind of femininity that many women feel is empowering. For the past couple of decades, many feminists in particular have been at the forefront of re-introducing these sorts of social signals. This has been partly driven by the way that many men have responded to diversification--by spitefully demanding that all gender markers be erased (usually in favor of the default masculine model), after years of enforcing those gender distinctions to secure their dominance. You can see how this interplay can become extremely complex. What happens when certain jobs are considered by many women to be too masculine, while at the same time a preference for overt femininity is on the rise (in a mostly positive way) among women? We can still easily trace the phenomenon to its origins in cut-and-dry sex discrimination within an oppressive, male-dominated society. Yet at the same time it's been co-opted--intentionally and unintentionally--by many women and become intrinsic to their sense of autonomy and self-expression. On the one hand that arguably makes those women complicit in sex discrimination; on the other hand trying to directly change those preferences can be (nay, is intrinsically) just as discriminatory. Now try to untangle that from whatever innate predispositions we have. It's intractable. The unspeakable truth here is that we have no good way of knowing the precise _extent_ to which hiring practices or work environments are quantitively and qualitatively sexist in the sense of being hostile to women. Some aspects of discrimination are effectively unmeasurable and perhaps even unknowable because there's no simple delineation between classes of perpetrators and victims. I don't think many people doubt that sexism exists, notwithstanding some rabid anti-feminist groups. The issue is 1) defining the problem and 2) finding solutions. But we'll never be able to satisfactorily define #1, and therefore #2 will always rest on some amount of speculation. What the author of the Google memo fails to realize--and what many smart leaders understand is unspeakable--is that affirmative action programs are, on some level, _intentionally_ designed to cope with complicity of the discriminated group. When push comes to shove, I think most thoughtful people agree that there's a strong element of self-selection driven by incredibly complex social dynamics. At some level there's a calculated judgment that says the way to address self-segregation is to _engineer_ a situation where there are more women in a role than there might otherwise be given some perfectly meritocratic environment. That judgment is almost certainly wrong. But there is no right answer. Discrimination, in all is forms, is a legacy that will never be extinguished; at least not anytime soon. It will reverberate for countless generations, tainting all our choices. And in as much as there's an innate tendency to discriminate, there'll never be a right answer. IMO, whether you agree or disagree with affirmative action, there has to be a tolerance for solutions which might overshoot the mark relative to some platonic ideal, especially if you're a member of a privileged group. It's not feasible to address sexism without accepting that some men are going to be discriminated against. Likewise for racism. It forces a contradiction that America has been wrestling with since its founding. There's no having our cake and eating it, too. It's difficult to discuss these things in a completely open and honest manner because there's literally no way to resolve the conflict between American notions of egalitarianism and meritocracy. To do so forces you to recognize that both concepts are deeply flawed, and not many people are prepared to do that.