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Two things: 1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolut
by lukev 9y ago
Two things:
1. Saying that women are "on average" worse programmers is exactly why people are upset with him. He doesn't need to be some kind of insane absolutist in order for what he said to be very problematic.
2. Even if there are statistically significant sex differences with regard to programming ability and inclination, there are also historical and sociological factors that are working against women in tech. Damore's memo was explicitly a negative reaction against some of the programs designed to counteract these systemic issues. As such, even if he were 100% right about the sexual dimorphism (which he isn't, see my other post in this thread), using that as an argument against trying to solve the sociological problems is not only logically unsound, but exhibits bad faith and bad motivations.
- verroq 9y ago1. Except he never even said women on average are worse. Secondly people being upset is not an argument against the truthiness of statement, no matter how problematic. 2. “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument.
- lukev 9y ago> Except he never even said women on average are worse. That is literally the whole point of his memo, that women have a different (i.e, worse, in this context) statistical distribution of ability and inclination to the tech field. > “How dare he question the effectiveness of affirmative action” is also not an argument. Sure it is. His argument is structured as follows: 1. Negative effect Q is caused by both A and B. 2. We can't do anything about A. 3. Therefore we shouldn't do anything about B. That's just bad reasoning.