8 ms·

I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumps

by iuguy 9y ago

I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said. I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here". I'm reminded of Chomsky's words in his book, The Common Good: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum" Where things have gone drastically wrong here are that the spectrum is now so tiny that any debate within that spectrum is now impossible. It becomes almost impossible to depolarize the situation and widen that spectrum, and that's going to lead to everything you more eloquently put above, if not more.

toyg 9y ago
> Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters? Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    Sad!
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      I was downvoted! Sad!
  - marrs 9y ago
    Made me laugh
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  Plus the fact that the 140 characters are done from a soapbox with possibly tens of thousands of people ready to pounce on it.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  This is like complaining that our mouths can only make 1 word sound at a time. How can you have a nuanced debate with a serial device? It just won't work.
elcapitan 9y ago
> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum" "What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism." Amen to that.
- _dps 9y ago
  There is the freedom to negotiate, and the freedom to leave. Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects the millions of people who genuinely suffered and died under Stalin.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    And, of course, there is the freedom to reduce the chances of getting confronted with this issue. Let's see ... How would one do that ... Make sure no women passes any interview. Obstruct women and generally get them out of the team, or at least don't work with them when avoidable. Why ? Because otherwise there WILL be instances, on occasion, where gender either is, or is simply perceived to be the basis for decisions. Since in both those instances you can get fired for simply getting into that situation, one must avoid getting into that situation at all. So we'll see what we see in every other company now also at Google. No mixed teams. Male teams being terrified (or even having an unofficial policy of not having women, or only in specific roles or teams or otherwise separate), and have a few women-only departments, like sales or HR to pretend to make the quota. We all know this is how Directors and VPs and the like think, we just don't say it. And (really quiet now) it is probably the correct way to maximize your career advancement. Once you use force, all reasoned debate is over. Google engineering, I hope you enjoyed actually having women, because you'll miss them in the future ... And for Google HR, or perhaps legal or some such, I pity the men working there. This is what people mean by "using force causes radicalization". Well, force was used. Expect strong reactions going forward.
    - Brockenstein 9y ago
coldtea 9y ago
>I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said. It's worse. They don't care for what you've said, and they don't particularly care about the issues they talk about either. Some (media people, etc.) use the issues to have a career or an audience. At best, they convince themselves they care, but they don't in any real capacity. Others use the issues to vent their frustrations from their lives (as a religion substitute and group signifier) and as an excuse to fight with people. Others are just repeating what is in fashion in their circle (progressive or conservative) and use the issues as a tribal thing. (And I'm talking about people on both sides of the spectrum here).
- rpiguy 9y ago
  Extreme leftism is literally a religion, so much so that you can't even present scientific evidence that is contrary to their decided narrative. Born Again/Woke Transgression/Microagression Heresy/Dissent Sinner/(Racist, Misogynist, Bigot, Sexist) EDIT: Original Sin/(Privilege, Unconscious Bias) They even follow the same behavior pattern. First they declare you a Sinner. If you've done research they question the motive of your research and claim it is invalid, regardless of its content. Like the Church burning those who tried to prove the Earth wasn't flat or the center of the solar system, when presented with evidence the extreme left says, "Heresy!" Then they want to be protected from the sinners. The sinners make them feel unsafe. They have to be taken care of. Seriously I thought humanity got past all this religious nonsense. We have strides to make in better treatment of women and minorities, but adopting this kind of religious attitude is ridiculous and not the way forward. Thank God that the US is a place where for whatever reason people inherently seem to not like following the rules.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    Don't forget that they recently created a concept of original sin: unconscious bias. Thanks to the Implicit Association Test, it can now be demonstrated that everyone has racial bias. If you point out that follow up studies have shown poor test-retest reliability and that there are all sorts of other flaws in this field of research, you'll simply be dismissed as a denier. So now, implicit bias takes the place of original sin, with white European (even the ones from Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with slavery) slaveholders standing in for Eve. You can never get rid of original sin, you can only ask for Jesus to forgive you. So who or what will be the new secular left wing Jesus?
nowo 9y ago
You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?
- iuguy 9y ago
  Can you indulge me in a thought experiment. You seem like a reasonable human being but I think your question shows that you may have fallen into a moral trap. Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point. If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation? If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view. The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this subject that gets to you in a way other's don't, and why? You might find some serious answers, but probably more questions here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    You make excellent points and are, logically speaking, correct. We are emotional creatures and we usually respond emotionally. If the list was called "hitler is my hero" there would be a visceral reaction. The framing, the contextual anchoring of a comment does matter and it should matter since we are social creatures that respond emotionally. I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.
jondubois 9y ago
Whenever you have a discussion about a topic in which people feel personally invested, their reasoning skills drop and their sentiment analysis ability goes up.
- iuguy 9y ago
  I've noticed that. But it does appear that for a lot of normally rational people this personal investment is at least amplified, if not manufactured almost entirely through the media.
  - atilaneves 9y ago
    A "normally rational person" is a person that is emotional at least 50% of the time but convinces themselves otherwise. Facts that seem to go against a person's beliefs provoke cognitive dissonance - it doesn't matter how technical they are or how logical they need to be to do their jobs.
    - adrianratnapala 9y ago
      It goes beyond that, Sabine Hossenfelder is better than a "normally rational person", she is seriously very smart it is in her bones to make a decent rational case for whatever she is saying. And here I am talking about her blog posts, not her job -- I have never read any of her papers. But in this case though, she is does repeat some interweb fallacies about the memo, even though she has certainly read it herself and thought about it for herself. But she does get the important thing right: which is that even if the memo is as bad as she says it is, it's still no reason for a sacking. [Disclamer: I am a Googler, but quite obviously I am not speaking for the company here.]
      - halfnibble 9y ago
        Is that what the PC police told you to put at the bottom of all your online posts? ;)
- rayiner 9y ago
snikeris 9y ago
> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum" For further reading on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
trb8 9y ago
> I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here". I guess they did not consider the voting booth to be private, as SV is one of the areas that swung towards Clinton?
- mrybczyn 9y ago
  Hard to say what the actual numbers are, but from the anecdotal evidence, a percentage of people felt that they had to pretend to be politically correct / leftist liberals. If you multiply any percentage, times the 80 million people in California, that's a lot of mental anguish and repression. As long as there's food and shelter for most, things will continue as they are. First little bit of suffering, and it will explode into revolution. Normal way of things.
ttkeil 9y ago
So, what are the odds that Damore read this thread and immediately turned around and wrote his essay? Note the Chomsky quote and use of "heresy". https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)

by iuguy 9y ago

toyg 9y ago

> Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time Understatement of the century. How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters?

kogepathic 9y ago
> How on earth can you expect to have "nuanced debate" with only 140 characters? Oh come now, it seems to work fine for Trump! /s
- Chris2048 9y ago
  Sad!
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    I was downvoted! Sad!
- marrs 9y ago
  Made me laugh
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Plus the fact that the 140 characters are done from a soapbox with possibly tens of thousands of people ready to pounce on it.
maxerickson 9y ago
This is like complaining that our mouths can only make 1 word sound at a time. How can you have a nuanced debate with a serial device? It just won't work.

elcapitan 9y ago

> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum" "What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism." Amen to that.

_dps 9y ago
There is the freedom to negotiate, and the freedom to leave. Comparing it to Stalinism is silly, and surely disrespects the millions of people who genuinely suffered and died under Stalin.
- candiodari 9y ago
  And, of course, there is the freedom to reduce the chances of getting confronted with this issue. Let's see ... How would one do that ... Make sure no women passes any interview. Obstruct women and generally get them out of the team, or at least don't work with them when avoidable. Why ? Because otherwise there WILL be instances, on occasion, where gender either is, or is simply perceived to be the basis for decisions. Since in both those instances you can get fired for simply getting into that situation, one must avoid getting into that situation at all. So we'll see what we see in every other company now also at Google. No mixed teams. Male teams being terrified (or even having an unofficial policy of not having women, or only in specific roles or teams or otherwise separate), and have a few women-only departments, like sales or HR to pretend to make the quota. We all know this is how Directors and VPs and the like think, we just don't say it. And (really quiet now) it is probably the correct way to maximize your career advancement. Once you use force, all reasoned debate is over. Google engineering, I hope you enjoyed actually having women, because you'll miss them in the future ... And for Google HR, or perhaps legal or some such, I pity the men working there. This is what people mean by "using force causes radicalization". Well, force was used. Expect strong reactions going forward.
  - Brockenstein 9y ago

coldtea 9y ago

>I made the grave mistake of trying to express that point on Twitter. Twitter seems to be a poor vehicle for nuanced debate at the best of time, but it's a dumpster fire right now full of raging people who don't understand what you've just said. It's worse. They don't care for what you've said, and they don't particularly care about the issues they talk about either. Some (media people, etc.) use the issues to have a career or an audience. At best, they convince themselves they care, but they don't in any real capacity. Others use the issues to vent their frustrations from their lives (as a religion substitute and group signifier) and as an excuse to fight with people. Others are just repeating what is in fashion in their circle (progressive or conservative) and use the issues as a tribal thing. (And I'm talking about people on both sides of the spectrum here).

rpiguy 9y ago
Extreme leftism is literally a religion, so much so that you can't even present scientific evidence that is contrary to their decided narrative. Born Again/Woke Transgression/Microagression Heresy/Dissent Sinner/(Racist, Misogynist, Bigot, Sexist) EDIT: Original Sin/(Privilege, Unconscious Bias) They even follow the same behavior pattern. First they declare you a Sinner. If you've done research they question the motive of your research and claim it is invalid, regardless of its content. Like the Church burning those who tried to prove the Earth wasn't flat or the center of the solar system, when presented with evidence the extreme left says, "Heresy!" Then they want to be protected from the sinners. The sinners make them feel unsafe. They have to be taken care of. Seriously I thought humanity got past all this religious nonsense. We have strides to make in better treatment of women and minorities, but adopting this kind of religious attitude is ridiculous and not the way forward. Thank God that the US is a place where for whatever reason people inherently seem to not like following the rules.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  Don't forget that they recently created a concept of original sin: unconscious bias. Thanks to the Implicit Association Test, it can now be demonstrated that everyone has racial bias. If you point out that follow up studies have shown poor test-retest reliability and that there are all sorts of other flaws in this field of research, you'll simply be dismissed as a denier. So now, implicit bias takes the place of original sin, with white European (even the ones from Eastern Europe that had nothing to do with slavery) slaveholders standing in for Eve. You can never get rid of original sin, you can only ask for Jesus to forgive you. So who or what will be the new secular left wing Jesus?

nowo 9y ago

You realize his paper was posted to a list at google called "pc-considered-harmful"?

iuguy 9y ago
Can you indulge me in a thought experiment. You seem like a reasonable human being but I think your question shows that you may have fallen into a moral trap. Can you explain to me the point I've made that you're arguing for or against with your question. Show me how your question has any impact on that point. If you're taking a side and saying "But did you know this person was literally Hitler" then you may have fallen prey to the manufactured outrage surrounding the issue. Take a step back and ask yourself if it matters if the list was called pc-considered-harmful, woodchipping-kittens or fluffy-bunnies? What is the impact on the list's name on the situation? If you're associating any questioning of the situation with the other side then it's worth spending a moment to see if you might have tied your beliefs to identity. When we tie our beliefs to our identity, we associate questioning of those beliefs with attacks on our identity. This is being exploited at the cost of completely polarizing your view. The next step would be to see how upset you are. If you're very upset or wound up, or maybe you're not but you've commented a zillion times about this elsewhere, why are you doing so about this matter and not other things? What is it about this issue that gets you so riled up and why? Why would you care about some guy you don't know getting fired more than the President's involvement with Russia, or the killing of innocent civilians in the Yemen? What is it about this subject that gets to you in a way other's don't, and why? You might find some serious answers, but probably more questions here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511...
- yequalsx 9y ago
  You make excellent points and are, logically speaking, correct. We are emotional creatures and we usually respond emotionally. If the list was called "hitler is my hero" there would be a visceral reaction. The framing, the contextual anchoring of a comment does matter and it should matter since we are social creatures that respond emotionally. I very much agree with the top comment made by Const-me and the overall points you made. Unfortunately fear and anger are what drives political discourse and media feeds that fire.

jondubois 9y ago

Whenever you have a discussion about a topic in which people feel personally invested, their reasoning skills drop and their sentiment analysis ability goes up.

iuguy 9y ago
I've noticed that. But it does appear that for a lot of normally rational people this personal investment is at least amplified, if not manufactured almost entirely through the media.
- atilaneves 9y ago
  A "normally rational person" is a person that is emotional at least 50% of the time but convinces themselves otherwise. Facts that seem to go against a person's beliefs provoke cognitive dissonance - it doesn't matter how technical they are or how logical they need to be to do their jobs.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    It goes beyond that, Sabine Hossenfelder is better than a "normally rational person", she is seriously very smart it is in her bones to make a decent rational case for whatever she is saying. And here I am talking about her blog posts, not her job -- I have never read any of her papers. But in this case though, she is does repeat some interweb fallacies about the memo, even though she has certainly read it herself and thought about it for herself. But she does get the important thing right: which is that even if the memo is as bad as she says it is, it's still no reason for a sacking. [Disclamer: I am a Googler, but quite obviously I am not speaking for the company here.]
    - halfnibble 9y ago
      Is that what the PC police told you to put at the bottom of all your online posts? ;)
rayiner 9y ago

snikeris 9y ago

> "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum" For further reading on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

trb8 9y ago

> I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here". I guess they did not consider the voting booth to be private, as SV is one of the areas that swung towards Clinton?

mrybczyn 9y ago
Hard to say what the actual numbers are, but from the anecdotal evidence, a percentage of people felt that they had to pretend to be politically correct / leftist liberals. If you multiply any percentage, times the 80 million people in California, that's a lot of mental anguish and repression. As long as there's food and shelter for most, things will continue as they are. First little bit of suffering, and it will explode into revolution. Normal way of things.

ttkeil 9y ago

So, what are the odds that Damore read this thread and immediately turned around and wrote his essay? Note the Chomsky quote and use of "heresy". https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)