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> Which part of the memo was intimidating, harassing, "Women on average have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." is one example. Just

> Which part of the memo was intimidating, harassing, "Women on average have more neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)." is one example. Just because something is true or a fact does not give some magical guarantee that people will not feel intimidated or harassed if that fact is presented in a certain way or in a certain context. And perhaps people who have lived an entire life of being discriminated against might not even care about the context. In order to make sure people don't feel intimidated, you need to use people skills, not science skills. You need to listen, you need to empathize, and ask questions. You need to be able to feel what someone else is feeling. Almost always this means in person. The opposite of blasting out a memo (which happens to insert some scientific facts) from behind your computer screen. Having good people skills often has little to do with science or even the truth. > not because I think that opinion is harassing, intimidating, If you can't see why a sweeping generalization about blacks (or any other group) can be harassing or intimidating, may I respectfully suggest you could use some education in the area of people skills? I'm saying that having come myself from a place where I had little respect for the soft skills involved in sales, marketing, diplomacy, charisma, leadership, and so on. You seem to have a great deal of respect for the truth and reality. Reality and truth also include feelings, and it's very rare that scientific truth helps anyone navigate how to make others feel like they are not being harassed or intimidated. > my low expectation of fairness from corporate leadership and middle management Why would you have any expectation of fairness from them? It's nowhere in their job description, and they don't get paid to be fair. At place like Google, very often they are being paid because they have a smidgen of people skills the tech folks below them are so sorely lacking in.

t00l2 9y ago
Hey, I'd like to challenge your view about advice to "learn people skills" which seems to push responsibility to one group, those who aren't already people skilled enough. There are more extroverts than introverts in the world. The first group is happy with social contact, talking with people and generally score better in empathy. Introverts are the other way around: they prefer to use text, do not like to give in to emotions and score worse in people skills. That's according to the book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts" but I guess it's not a controversial point to make anyway, and while you can find many outliers as in any discipline, I think it's a fairly good generalization. Now, it may depend on the company or group, so two scenarios: 1) Introverts are a majority, extroverts a minority - maybe that's a tech company: shouldn't extroverts use their people skills and be able to figure out that introverts mean no harm and just prefer to communicate by sending long pieces of text with many scientific sources cited instead of talking with even one person? They might have even been doing this for many years, in the introvertive bubble of their fellow colleagues who shy away from emotions. Of course, extroverts could still feel emotionally touched and maybe even attacked as the minority - but then, been empathetic and knowing the style of introverts, shouldn't they try to teach them people skills? Are we sure firing this person is going to be an actual lesson to him? Or maybe there is no way to teach introverts people skills, as Google with a load of money and staff cannot even challenge beliefs of one employee? How come then we can ask single introverts to learn it on their own? Does it mean we're all doomed as more and more tech companies change from big groups of introverted engineers to cross-disciplinary team with a mix of characters? 2) Extroverts are a majority, introverts are a minority - again, using their people skills extroverts would surely recognize that introverts are not comfortable with people skills... so if introverts are a minority, is firing them for miss-following the code of conduct, written most likely by the majority i.e. extroverts, a form of discrimination? For the sake of diversity, shouldn't they all learn about more scientific, less emotional approach? Or should you be schooled only if you're in the minority without those skills? IMO author of the memo made a decent attempt at using his people skills on this paper - what the post from Sabine acutally acknowledged, although you could generalize based on her background she's an introvert as well. It just looks like that other people have higher expectations of people skills but the question is have they done enough to learn the science skills themselves or just assume that everyone should have people skills at the exact level they want because they dictate so as a majority. (Cheers, sorry for all the mistakes, English is not my native language.)
- tchaffee 9y ago
  Agreed. Those are all very good points. If this guy has any defense at all, it could be that he's a minority somewhere on the spectrum of Asperger's, and that a diverse company also needs to somehow accommodate his inability to understand how his statements could have made others feel. On the other hand, it's quite possible he's just an angry white male who feels like he's being left out but got it off his chest when empowered behind his computer screen, and with his weapons of scientific fact. Jabs of harassment are often delivered buried within a harmless context. Perhaps a bit of both. It will be for the courts to decide. Long term, you gave me some ideas. If my company ever gets big enough to have a mix of introverts and extroverts I wonder if it would be a good idea to pair introverts and extroverts so they can "protect" each other? Extroverts can help introverts from saying really insensitive stuff, and introverts could help train the extroverts about when to leave the introverts alone, and to stop harassing them about "being more social". Just a thought...
cmcglochlin 9y ago
This entire post is incredibly dangerous. > Having good people skills often has little to do with science or even the truth. I can only assume you're liberal based on your stance, but you do an enormous amount of damage to progressive values and true diversity when you state things like this. Establishing harassment as something independent and impervious to truth creates the ultimate echo chamber that enables a post-fact world. So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser? How does this apply when you write your own positions? Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society, and to ignore it is to doom us to follow what makes us feel better, not what's right. There are numerous examples through out history where I'm sure the majority would have liked to ignore facts in order to make themselves feel better and maintain the status quo. Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth. You create a strawman diverting from the document in question by talking about "sweeping generalization about blacks," when the previous poster was clearly addressing the document, not your flimsy hypothetical. And yet, you then proceed to paint tech folks below management as completely lacking in the people skills to understand management and your enlightened position. To be clear, I thought the conclusions of the document were dumb, but your handling of controversial topics strikes me as equally dangerous, if not more so. I think your heart is in the right place, but strive to be like John Milton in how you digest the arguments of others: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed..." edit: sp & truth
- tchaffee 9y ago
  > Establishing harassment as something independent and impervious to truth creates the ultimate echo chamber that enables a post-fact world. Why is harassment determined by humans in a court of law, very often using their gut instincts, if it has some ultimate test tube truth that can be used to decide whether or not it occurred? What's the lab test I'm not aware of? Ok, I'm being a little facetious, but still, can you even guide me to an written objective source of truth that describes exactly what harassment is and isn't? I can provide tons of concrete examples and we all know it when we see it, but I think it's incredibly hard to give an objective description. It's certainly never about words. One person's "nigger" is friendly, the other person's "nigger" is harassment and how it was intended and how it was received both have to do with what each person was feeling. Is there a way to to objectively determine truth about how people felt when they said or heard something? > So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser? I never said that. I did say that harassment is about human relationships and people skills and not in the domain of facts. You can lie to someone and harass them. You can tell them the truth and harass them. You can lie to someone and make their day better. You can tell the truth to someone and make their day better. There is very little relationship between objective truth and people skills. > You create a strawman No, it's an analogy. And a very very close one. The original document made sweeping generalizations about women. I simply replaced "women" with "blacks" so it's easier to see the pattern of how offensive it is to make sweeping generalizations. True generalizations, or false one, folks don't like being put in a bucket of "you tend to act this way because you are an _fill in the blank_". > Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society, Agreed. Scientific truth and emotional truth are two very different things. Relationships don't really have a "what's right" or an objective truth do they? It's always very objective. > Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth. And understanding of the objective truth is a goal for some people. Other people have zero interest in the objective truth and are more interested in their emotional life and relationships with others. Or something else. Maybe art. Or sales. Both of which have little to do with objective truth. Don't assign your personal values to others. > but strive to be like John Milton I don't know Milton. I'll check him out. Thanks for the recommendation.

t00l2 9y ago

Hey, I'd like to challenge your view about advice to "learn people skills" which seems to push responsibility to one group, those who aren't already people skilled enough. There are more extroverts than introverts in the world. The first group is happy with social contact, talking with people and generally score better in empathy. Introverts are the other way around: they prefer to use text, do not like to give in to emotions and score worse in people skills. That's according to the book "Quiet: The Power of Introverts" but I guess it's not a controversial point to make anyway, and while you can find many outliers as in any discipline, I think it's a fairly good generalization. Now, it may depend on the company or group, so two scenarios: 1) Introverts are a majority, extroverts a minority - maybe that's a tech company: shouldn't extroverts use their people skills and be able to figure out that introverts mean no harm and just prefer to communicate by sending long pieces of text with many scientific sources cited instead of talking with even one person? They might have even been doing this for many years, in the introvertive bubble of their fellow colleagues who shy away from emotions. Of course, extroverts could still feel emotionally touched and maybe even attacked as the minority - but then, been empathetic and knowing the style of introverts, shouldn't they try to teach them people skills? Are we sure firing this person is going to be an actual lesson to him? Or maybe there is no way to teach introverts people skills, as Google with a load of money and staff cannot even challenge beliefs of one employee? How come then we can ask single introverts to learn it on their own? Does it mean we're all doomed as more and more tech companies change from big groups of introverted engineers to cross-disciplinary team with a mix of characters? 2) Extroverts are a majority, introverts are a minority - again, using their people skills extroverts would surely recognize that introverts are not comfortable with people skills... so if introverts are a minority, is firing them for miss-following the code of conduct, written most likely by the majority i.e. extroverts, a form of discrimination? For the sake of diversity, shouldn't they all learn about more scientific, less emotional approach? Or should you be schooled only if you're in the minority without those skills? IMO author of the memo made a decent attempt at using his people skills on this paper - what the post from Sabine acutally acknowledged, although you could generalize based on her background she's an introvert as well. It just looks like that other people have higher expectations of people skills but the question is have they done enough to learn the science skills themselves or just assume that everyone should have people skills at the exact level they want because they dictate so as a majority. (Cheers, sorry for all the mistakes, English is not my native language.)

tchaffee 9y ago
Agreed. Those are all very good points. If this guy has any defense at all, it could be that he's a minority somewhere on the spectrum of Asperger's, and that a diverse company also needs to somehow accommodate his inability to understand how his statements could have made others feel. On the other hand, it's quite possible he's just an angry white male who feels like he's being left out but got it off his chest when empowered behind his computer screen, and with his weapons of scientific fact. Jabs of harassment are often delivered buried within a harmless context. Perhaps a bit of both. It will be for the courts to decide. Long term, you gave me some ideas. If my company ever gets big enough to have a mix of introverts and extroverts I wonder if it would be a good idea to pair introverts and extroverts so they can "protect" each other? Extroverts can help introverts from saying really insensitive stuff, and introverts could help train the extroverts about when to leave the introverts alone, and to stop harassing them about "being more social". Just a thought...

cmcglochlin 9y ago

This entire post is incredibly dangerous. > Having good people skills often has little to do with science or even the truth. I can only assume you're liberal based on your stance, but you do an enormous amount of damage to progressive values and true diversity when you state things like this. Establishing harassment as something independent and impervious to truth creates the ultimate echo chamber that enables a post-fact world. So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser? How does this apply when you write your own positions? Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society, and to ignore it is to doom us to follow what makes us feel better, not what's right. There are numerous examples through out history where I'm sure the majority would have liked to ignore facts in order to make themselves feel better and maintain the status quo. Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth. You create a strawman diverting from the document in question by talking about "sweeping generalization about blacks," when the previous poster was clearly addressing the document, not your flimsy hypothetical. And yet, you then proceed to paint tech folks below management as completely lacking in the people skills to understand management and your enlightened position. To be clear, I thought the conclusions of the document were dumb, but your handling of controversial topics strikes me as equally dangerous, if not more so. I think your heart is in the right place, but strive to be like John Milton in how you digest the arguments of others: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed..." edit: sp & truth

tchaffee 9y ago
> Establishing harassment as something independent and impervious to truth creates the ultimate echo chamber that enables a post-fact world. Why is harassment determined by humans in a court of law, very often using their gut instincts, if it has some ultimate test tube truth that can be used to decide whether or not it occurred? What's the lab test I'm not aware of? Ok, I'm being a little facetious, but still, can you even guide me to an written objective source of truth that describes exactly what harassment is and isn't? I can provide tons of concrete examples and we all know it when we see it, but I think it's incredibly hard to give an objective description. It's certainly never about words. One person's "nigger" is friendly, the other person's "nigger" is harassment and how it was intended and how it was received both have to do with what each person was feeling. Is there a way to to objectively determine truth about how people felt when they said or heard something? > So anyone who comes to you with a fact or a quantum of reality you don't like should be considered a harasser? I never said that. I did say that harassment is about human relationships and people skills and not in the domain of facts. You can lie to someone and harass them. You can tell them the truth and harass them. You can lie to someone and make their day better. You can tell the truth to someone and make their day better. There is very little relationship between objective truth and people skills. > You create a strawman No, it's an analogy. And a very very close one. The original document made sweeping generalizations about women. I simply replaced "women" with "blacks" so it's easier to see the pattern of how offensive it is to make sweeping generalizations. True generalizations, or false one, folks don't like being put in a bucket of "you tend to act this way because you are an _fill in the blank_". > Truth is what allows us to move forward as a society, Agreed. Scientific truth and emotional truth are two very different things. Relationships don't really have a "what's right" or an objective truth do they? It's always very objective. > Good people skills has everything to do with leading us to better and positive understanding of objective truth. And understanding of the objective truth is a goal for some people. Other people have zero interest in the objective truth and are more interested in their emotional life and relationships with others. Or something else. Maybe art. Or sales. Both of which have little to do with objective truth. Don't assign your personal values to others. > but strive to be like John Milton I don't know Milton. I'll check him out. Thanks for the recommendation.