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> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how di

> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced his preexisting beliefs, which is kind of the opposite of science.

conanbatt 9y ago
The Damore case has nothing to do with the validity of the science. If the scientific interpretation had been perfectly reasonable there would still be a flip-out and would have also been fired. Thats what's scary.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  Damore was fired not because his science was flawed, but because he made himself essentially impossible to work with. Would you be "scared" if someone refuses to take a shower for months on end and a company decides to fire them?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    I disagree entirely and vehemently to what you are saying. > he made himself essentially impossible to work with Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him. But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      > But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination? > He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        > I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it. Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? > Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere. He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
        dguaraglia 9y ago
        > Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? Someone being actively nasty towards women in his team just because they are women will most likely get fired, so that's a self-limiting problem. > He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up! What timeline? There's only one timeline: 1) He releases a "manifesto" expressing his opinion 2) Someone reads the manifesto, is disgusted and a controversy ensues 3) Media picks up on the controversy 4) Google is forced into a really shitty position by being asked a bunch of times what they are going to do 5) Damore gets fired 6) Damore goes to "men's rights advocate" Stefan Molyneaux podcast and wears his "Goolag" shirt. He does a bit of media, tweets out some really ambiguous tweets. 7) The world forgets about Damore. So where's the flaw in the timeline?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    What does it say about your industry, if even people with average, moderate positions are "impossible to work with"?
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      As I explained to conanbatt, the problem is that he put himself in a position of being perceived as biased against women. Even if 90% of the company agreed with him - even if the CEO agreed with him - any Legal department would recommend firing him, rather than have to deal with the liability. I propose a mental exercise: let's say that Damore had written a similar "manifesto" but instead of concluding that "women are not that interested in engineering" he concluded "black people are not that interested in engineering". Would you see a problem with that? Do you think that might create some friction with fellow engineers of color?
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        What if Damore had been a woman. What do you think would have happened then. This is just en exercise in public outrage, not in morality, responsibility or the application of ideals.
        dguaraglia 9y ago
        Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too. I don't really understand this perception that "women get away with everything". The legal department would have as much of an argument to fire a female Damore as they'd have a male Damore.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        > Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too. I seriously doubt that. The public would generally be conflicted about crucifying a woman in the name of women, it would have not arised easily to public knowledge. To deepen the understanding of the situation, men and women withing google might have shown public agreement of some level with the essay and they havent been fire. People have done threats and attacks of many degrees on Damore because of that essay, which would have been a firable offense in any other circumstance.
Houshalter 9y ago
It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  > That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios. This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
    - dguaraglia 9y ago
      > Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.) If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.) I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.
ghostcluster 9y ago
The reason the Damore stuff is so insane is because the science he cited is abundant and well replicated over decades! Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  There's also an equal or bigger amount of science proving that gender "interests" are driven in a large part by cultural background. As I linked elsewhere, Communist Russia used to have a huge participation of women in "STEM" fields, while Europe and the US were still moving from single-income families to the current standard of working professional women. There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Look at the Stanford link. > There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.

conanbatt 9y ago

The Damore case has nothing to do with the validity of the science. If the scientific interpretation had been perfectly reasonable there would still be a flip-out and would have also been fired. Thats what's scary.

dguaraglia 9y ago
Damore was fired not because his science was flawed, but because he made himself essentially impossible to work with. Would you be "scared" if someone refuses to take a shower for months on end and a company decides to fire them?
- conanbatt 9y ago
  I disagree entirely and vehemently to what you are saying. > he made himself essentially impossible to work with Who told you this? Im sure there were 100's of engineers, including female co-workers, at google that would have worked with him. But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. He got fired because the public asked him to be fired and punished, and google complied for PR.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    > But lets play along, lets say that effectively no single person at google would voluntarily let himself work with Damore. Why do you think that is? Because 99.9% disagree with his essay? Or because he became a target for scorn in the public eye that overpunished him? I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? Do you think that consists a liability for the company? Does the company own the onus of making sure Damore doesn't put them in a position where they might be sued for gender discrimination? > He was not fired because he wrote a shabby essay. He did not get fired for writing the essay itself. Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      > I'll give you a hint: if you are a female engineer, and you are put as a report for Damore, would you ever have a lingering feeling he might be biased against you if he decided to promote your male peer instead of you? I don't know. Maybe. What we do know if that if someone else shares the same opinion of Damore within google, we will never hear about it , and the bias effect you attribute will still happen but there would be no way to address it. Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? > Wrong. He was fired because he publicly said "fuck it, I don't believe that women are equal and you have to suck it up." That's his prerogative, but doesn't entitle him to a job anywhere. He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up!
      - dguaraglia 9y ago
        > Not only that, but it might have exacerbated it: someone with the fear of being perceived bias and losing his job will want as few women in his team as possible. How about that possibility? Someone being actively nasty towards women in his team just because they are women will most likely get fired, so that's a self-limiting problem. > He said it multiple days before he got fired. The timeline doesn't add up! What timeline? There's only one timeline: 1) He releases a "manifesto" expressing his opinion 2) Someone reads the manifesto, is disgusted and a controversy ensues 3) Media picks up on the controversy 4) Google is forced into a really shitty position by being asked a bunch of times what they are going to do 5) Damore gets fired 6) Damore goes to "men's rights advocate" Stefan Molyneaux podcast and wears his "Goolag" shirt. He does a bit of media, tweets out some really ambiguous tweets. 7) The world forgets about Damore. So where's the flaw in the timeline?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 9y ago
  What does it say about your industry, if even people with average, moderate positions are "impossible to work with"?
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    As I explained to conanbatt, the problem is that he put himself in a position of being perceived as biased against women. Even if 90% of the company agreed with him - even if the CEO agreed with him - any Legal department would recommend firing him, rather than have to deal with the liability. I propose a mental exercise: let's say that Damore had written a similar "manifesto" but instead of concluding that "women are not that interested in engineering" he concluded "black people are not that interested in engineering". Would you see a problem with that? Do you think that might create some friction with fellow engineers of color?
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      What if Damore had been a woman. What do you think would have happened then. This is just en exercise in public outrage, not in morality, responsibility or the application of ideals.
      - dguaraglia 9y ago
        Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too. I don't really understand this perception that "women get away with everything". The legal department would have as much of an argument to fire a female Damore as they'd have a male Damore.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        > Had Damore been a woman, she would have to be fired too. I seriously doubt that. The public would generally be conflicted about crucifying a woman in the name of women, it would have not arised easily to public knowledge. To deepen the understanding of the situation, men and women withing google might have shown public agreement of some level with the essay and they havent been fire. People have done threats and attacks of many degrees on Damore because of that essay, which would have been a firable offense in any other circumstance.

Houshalter 9y ago

It wasn't the strongest possible argument for his case IMO. There are other better studies and statistics I would have referenced. But it was good enough and the points were solid,. That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios.

dguaraglia 9y ago
> That there are observable personality differences between men and women, and we shouldn't expect perfect gender ratios. This assumption always bothers me. What do you think defines behavior? Is it purely culture, or purely biology? How do you rule out culture when you don't have a culture that promotes equality?
- Houshalter 9y ago
  It seems perfectly plausible to me that it's biological. E.g. identical twins have similar personality measures. But it does it matter? Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. Or the effectiveness of Google's diversity programs that Damore was arguing against.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    > Even if it is cultural, it still disputes the feminist argument that the disparity is due to sexism in tech. This sentence contradicts itself. If it is cultural, then it'd be most likely based on sexist stereotypes that we force on our kids from an early age (mind you, when I say sexist I don't mean in the "actively nasty towards a gender" way, but in the "you define people by their gender even before you know them" way.) If that's the case, then that sexist behavior permeates the culture, which means tech companies are not going to be devoid of it. Which would make the disparity based on sexism in tech (and everywhere else.) I think people get overly defensive about being called "sexist" because they perceive it as an attack on them. It is not. The moment you realize that, it's so much easier to get out of the "them vs. us" mentality and actually take constructive criticism better.

ghostcluster 9y ago

The reason the Damore stuff is so insane is because the science he cited is abundant and well replicated over decades! Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometrics-psychology/sex-differences-on-g-and-non-g-intellectual-performance-reveal-potential-sources-of-stem-discrepancies/ http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri... There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.

dguaraglia 9y ago
There's also an equal or bigger amount of science proving that gender "interests" are driven in a large part by cultural background. As I linked elsewhere, Communist Russia used to have a huge participation of women in "STEM" fields, while Europe and the US were still moving from single-income families to the current standard of working professional women. There's nothing we can do to fix the - alleged - biological differences between men and women. There's a lot we can do to fix the cultural factors leading to gender inequality. So why not work on the stuff we can work on rather than assuming "awwww, why bother, if there's some chance it might be biological?"
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Look at the Stanford link. > There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.