7 ms·

Sure, from Damore’s Google lawsuit: https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121 https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/950446329603461121

adamsea 9y ago
Ah, James Damore, the guy who thought he knew stuff. Seems like that is the worst possible example. It's like, self-defeating. It's like, yes, lets pick the guy who yet again wants to rationalize institutionalized sexism with bad science and thought it would be OK to tell his _coworkers_ why some of them are, scientifically, inferior to him. And expect for nobody to take offense to this and that he would not get fired for it.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  Did you read the link? Those aren’t his words, they’re straight from Google employees.
  - adamsea 9y ago
    I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue. I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... "The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous" https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-to-james-damore-1822160852 https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-t... "But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing." https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio... "TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
    - geofft 9y ago
      (FYI, I agree with your views but I think that shifting this thread to the merits of the Damore memo is off-topic and unproductive - it's months old, and everyone who knows about it has made up their minds about it already. I think there's room for productive conversation about the blog post this comment thread is supposed to be about, and I think re-litigating the Damore memo is just going to push this thread in the flameward direction, as 'dang puts it.)
      - adamsea 9y ago
        Good point :)
- manfredo 9y ago
  Can you identify in his memo where he claimed that, "his _coworkers_... are scientifically, inferior to him."
  - adamsea 9y ago
    "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." He lays the groundwork for that argument there, and then his rhetoric which builds upon this throughout the memo basically argues that, possibly, men are better biologically suited than women for high status/stress/leadership roles, or roles involving "things", as he says men are more into "things", and women more into "people".
    - manfredo 9y ago
      He argues that biology is, in part, a cause for different preferences and choices between men and women. At no point did he claim any superiority of ability. "X is worse at Y" is not at all the same thing as "X, on average, will choose to do Y at a smaller rate." Also, I find the notion that people who choose to not work in tech or work smaller hours are somehow inferior quite demeaning. My brother wasn't very interested in tech, so he went into a different field. Am I (who did go into tech) a superior person to my brother due to our choice of work? Similarly, would I be a lesser person if I worked 30-35 hours instead of my usual 40-45?
      - majormajor 9y ago
        So let's take that "biological difference in choices" as premise A, and then take premise B to be the company professing a policy to want a more even split. The result of that might be an action C, where you lower the standards required to hire people who are in one group to get the numbers more even - otherwise A will cause there to be not enough people of your usually quality for the numbers you want in B. And that was what he alleged: that the women hired didn't have as high a bar to pass. And that's where, if you're a woman in the same job as him, you take offense, because the implications of his argument are inescapable: a lot of those women are inferior. So if you're a Google higher-up who doesn't believe that their diversity/outreach programs are a lowered standards (say, you think they're a different approach to compensate for preparation differences in readiness for certain interviews), then you pretty much have to get rid of the guy who insists on shouting from the rooftops that a bunch of his coworkers aren't as good as he is. Damore sealed his own fate because he either (a) didn't think through this all, sabotaging his own credibility in the process, or (b) evil-genius arranged it to give himself a platform for a lawsuit and a bunch of conservative media fawning.
- dang 9y ago
  This veers way off topic, guarantees a flamewar, and is nothing that HN hasn't gone over dozens of times by now. Please don't wreak this kind of damage here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - adamsea 9y ago
    Sorry.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
majormajor 9y ago
Do you work there and can elaborate on what you're seeing? I'd like to see if there's a widespread trend people are reporting here, not just a washed-over retread of a few high-profile he-said/she-said incidents. The screenshot in that twitter link is woefully free of context. There are several contexts I could imagine where it would be harmless (e.g. discussion of ways to get a more diverse representation in a discussion already centered around that), several other where it would be very bad (e.g. direct unsolicited managerial behavior advice). To me it sounds more like the former from the limited context and tone. I'd be more likely to take offense at the implication that as a non-Googler I'm cheesy and unimportant than the "white" part. The people I know at Google claim it isn't accurate to say there's a culture of harassment or discrimination or anything. So... in absence of video recordings, etc, from either side, I believe the people I know personally.
Aloha 9y ago
Jesus Christ. Google seems to be infested by wingnuttery on both sides - nearly every example there is an example of left or right crazies. But they do seem to show a pattern of left leaning wingnuts being more accepted than right leaning.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  It's a company of 72,000 people where employees are encouraged to speak their minds. Get any group of 72,000 people together and have them say what they actually believe and you'll find a lot of wingnuttery. Just look at the comment section of any blog, news story, YouTube video, or Internet forum. The alternative viewpoint is that humanity actually holds far more diversity of thought and ideology than you had ever conceptualized before, and that this is a peek into the minds of many, many of your fellow human beings. It's glorious (and somewhat miraculous that we haven't killed each other yet, knock on wood...)
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    > encouraged to speak their minds. Damore was fired though.
    - dang 9y ago
      It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological and political battle. That's an abuse of the site—it kills the spirit we want here—so we ban accounts that do it, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Thanks for a sterling example of what I was saying elsewhere. Nearly 9 years here, and a ban threat. Hell of a way to try and keep order boss.
        deleted 9y ago
geofft 9y ago
I've read the complaint and scrolled through the almost 100 pages of screenshots of bad internal memes and social media posts. The memes are bad, yes. But the complaint is a hodge-podge of things that reference "white" or "conservative" or "male" or any such thing, in no particular order. For instance, under "Anti-Caucasian Postings," there's a screenshot of an employee sharing (on internal G+) a link to Tim Chevalier's blog post "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger: Taking Male Entitlement Seriously." This tells me two things: first, the people who prepared this complaint were so scattershot in their attempt that they stuck something with "male" under "Anti-Caucasian Postings." (The employee's commentary on the link is "The doc considered formally as abuse springing from an entitled worldview. Excellent essay." - so nothing anti-Caucasian there, either. The post itself, which is on the public internet, does mention race a few times, but focuses on gender.) Second, it tells me that the people preparing the complaint think that a white man's link to a white man's essay expressing opposition to the manifestos of mass murderer Elliot Rodger, mass murderer Marc Lépine, and James Damore is somehow either anti-Caucasian or anti-male (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they miscategorized it). Now, you may certainly argue that it's distasteful, unprofessional, unacceptable, and perhaps even unconscionable to have your coworkers compare you to two mass murderers simply for having written an article that (in their view) makes similar points. I'd certainly agree that there were and still are attacks on James Damore as an individual at Google. But that is in no way anti-white or anti-male, unless you think that the content of those manifestos, and (in two cases) their direct connection to mass murder, is somehow intrinsic to whiteness or maleness - which seems both wrong and a huge attack on white men, more than anything alleged in the complaint. Plenty of other posts are similarly not attacks on whiteness or maleness, many of which are miscategorized - other "anti-Caucasian postings" include someone writing that "the creator of Dilbert is ... a paranoid sexist dickbag", a link to an HBR article entitled "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?", a truly awful-quality meme conveying "0 days since last ... white male says diversity isn't important," etc. Finally, remember that this is a lawsuit by one side, which has a story to tell. We don't know that we're not seeing a cherry-picked picture. Maybe these sorts of low-quality memes and overly-political posts on corporate channels affect everyone. It's certainly the case that shortly after Damore's suit, a story came out about an employee with rather diametrically opposed opinions being pushed out by management: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDwRdvdselVQmUwEjOFXGQ/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDw...
dang 9y ago
This was guaranteed to produce an off-topic flamewar, one which HN has already litigated to death and well into zombieland. Please don't do that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  Hasn't the topic of the article already been "litigated to death" and been the subject of many flame wars? In what manner is that twitter link "off-topic" in the context of this article? Has the twitter link ever been discussed here rather than killed? I, for one, found it quite surprising. Based on news coverage and personal interactions with Googlers, I had no idea people were writing such things without reprimand from HR. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this link is the most substantive and thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    This is what I don't understand. I'm now being threatened with being banned while adamsea is getting a slap on the wrist. If you're only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN, why even allow the threads in the first place? I was responding to the question: > Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? What could I have done to answer that without posting some evidence?
    - dang 9y ago
      I answered you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062, which should clarify most of this. I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'primarily', which is the test we use, as explained in that comment I just linked to. I didn't reply to you on the basis of one isolated comment but rather on your use of HN overall, which is what we care about. It's false, of course, that you're "only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN". If that were true, we wouldn't have flamewars, and boy do we have flamewars.

adamsea 9y ago

Ah, James Damore, the guy who thought he knew stuff. Seems like that is the worst possible example. It's like, self-defeating. It's like, yes, lets pick the guy who yet again wants to rationalize institutionalized sexism with bad science and thought it would be OK to tell his _coworkers_ why some of them are, scientifically, inferior to him. And expect for nobody to take offense to this and that he would not get fired for it.

malvosenior 9y ago
Did you read the link? Those aren’t his words, they’re straight from Google employees.
- adamsea 9y ago
  I read his memo, the Wired article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, the Quora article explaining his poor interpretation of existing science, and the recent Gizmodo article about the lawsuit. I glanced at your twitter link; once I saw it was about his lawsuit I shifted gears to the root of the issue. I thought Damore's comment in footnote 9, when discussing compensation in the workplace, that "Considering women spend more money than men" was particularly insightful ;) /s https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncensored-memo-with-charts-and-cites-339f3d2d05f https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-james-damore-memo-uncenso... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-... "The problem is, the science in Damore’s memo is still very much in play, and his analysis of its implications is at best politically naive and at worst dangerous" https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-to-james-damore-1822160852 https://gizmodo.com/lets-be-very-clear-about-what-happened-t... "But despite the legal gymnastics of Damore’s attorneys, getting fired for his memo wasn’t discrimination, and it certainly wasn’t censorship. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the time of the memo’s circulation, it violated the company’s policies, perpetuating sexist ideologies. Damore disclosed to his non-male colleagues that he believes that they are predisposed to being worse at their jobs than males. Former Google engineer Yonatan Zunger sums it up nicely in this line from his blog post responding to Damore’s memo: “You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.” In a workplace, you can’t say whatever you’d like without consequences—violating a company’s code of conduct is grounds for firing." https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-biological-claims-made-in-the-document-about-diversity-written-by-a-Google-employee-in-August-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-the-bio... "TL;DR: Yes, men and women are biologically different — which doesn’t mean what the author thinks it does. The article perniciously misrepresents the nature and significance of known sex differences to advance what appears to be a covert alt-right agenda."
  - geofft 9y ago
    (FYI, I agree with your views but I think that shifting this thread to the merits of the Damore memo is off-topic and unproductive - it's months old, and everyone who knows about it has made up their minds about it already. I think there's room for productive conversation about the blog post this comment thread is supposed to be about, and I think re-litigating the Damore memo is just going to push this thread in the flameward direction, as 'dang puts it.)
    - adamsea 9y ago
      Good point :)
manfredo 9y ago
Can you identify in his memo where he claimed that, "his _coworkers_... are scientifically, inferior to him."
- adamsea 9y ago
  "Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership." He lays the groundwork for that argument there, and then his rhetoric which builds upon this throughout the memo basically argues that, possibly, men are better biologically suited than women for high status/stress/leadership roles, or roles involving "things", as he says men are more into "things", and women more into "people".
  - manfredo 9y ago
    He argues that biology is, in part, a cause for different preferences and choices between men and women. At no point did he claim any superiority of ability. "X is worse at Y" is not at all the same thing as "X, on average, will choose to do Y at a smaller rate." Also, I find the notion that people who choose to not work in tech or work smaller hours are somehow inferior quite demeaning. My brother wasn't very interested in tech, so he went into a different field. Am I (who did go into tech) a superior person to my brother due to our choice of work? Similarly, would I be a lesser person if I worked 30-35 hours instead of my usual 40-45?
    - majormajor 9y ago
      So let's take that "biological difference in choices" as premise A, and then take premise B to be the company professing a policy to want a more even split. The result of that might be an action C, where you lower the standards required to hire people who are in one group to get the numbers more even - otherwise A will cause there to be not enough people of your usually quality for the numbers you want in B. And that was what he alleged: that the women hired didn't have as high a bar to pass. And that's where, if you're a woman in the same job as him, you take offense, because the implications of his argument are inescapable: a lot of those women are inferior. So if you're a Google higher-up who doesn't believe that their diversity/outreach programs are a lowered standards (say, you think they're a different approach to compensate for preparation differences in readiness for certain interviews), then you pretty much have to get rid of the guy who insists on shouting from the rooftops that a bunch of his coworkers aren't as good as he is. Damore sealed his own fate because he either (a) didn't think through this all, sabotaging his own credibility in the process, or (b) evil-genius arranged it to give himself a platform for a lawsuit and a bunch of conservative media fawning.
dang 9y ago
This veers way off topic, guarantees a flamewar, and is nothing that HN hasn't gone over dozens of times by now. Please don't wreak this kind of damage here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- adamsea 9y ago
  Sorry.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

majormajor 9y ago

Do you work there and can elaborate on what you're seeing? I'd like to see if there's a widespread trend people are reporting here, not just a washed-over retread of a few high-profile he-said/she-said incidents. The screenshot in that twitter link is woefully free of context. There are several contexts I could imagine where it would be harmless (e.g. discussion of ways to get a more diverse representation in a discussion already centered around that), several other where it would be very bad (e.g. direct unsolicited managerial behavior advice). To me it sounds more like the former from the limited context and tone. I'd be more likely to take offense at the implication that as a non-Googler I'm cheesy and unimportant than the "white" part. The people I know at Google claim it isn't accurate to say there's a culture of harassment or discrimination or anything. So... in absence of video recordings, etc, from either side, I believe the people I know personally.

Aloha 9y ago

Jesus Christ. Google seems to be infested by wingnuttery on both sides - nearly every example there is an example of left or right crazies. But they do seem to show a pattern of left leaning wingnuts being more accepted than right leaning.

nostrademons 9y ago
It's a company of 72,000 people where employees are encouraged to speak their minds. Get any group of 72,000 people together and have them say what they actually believe and you'll find a lot of wingnuttery. Just look at the comment section of any blog, news story, YouTube video, or Internet forum. The alternative viewpoint is that humanity actually holds far more diversity of thought and ideology than you had ever conceptualized before, and that this is a peek into the minds of many, many of your fellow human beings. It's glorious (and somewhat miraculous that we haven't killed each other yet, knock on wood...)
- malvosenior 9y ago
  > encouraged to speak their minds. Damore was fired though.
  - dang 9y ago
    It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological and political battle. That's an abuse of the site—it kills the spirit we want here—so we ban accounts that do it, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Thanks for a sterling example of what I was saying elsewhere. Nearly 9 years here, and a ban threat. Hell of a way to try and keep order boss.
      - deleted 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

I've read the complaint and scrolled through the almost 100 pages of screenshots of bad internal memes and social media posts. The memes are bad, yes. But the complaint is a hodge-podge of things that reference "white" or "conservative" or "male" or any such thing, in no particular order. For instance, under "Anti-Caucasian Postings," there's a screenshot of an employee sharing (on internal G+) a link to Tim Chevalier's blog post "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger: Taking Male Entitlement Seriously." This tells me two things: first, the people who prepared this complaint were so scattershot in their attempt that they stuck something with "male" under "Anti-Caucasian Postings." (The employee's commentary on the link is "The doc considered formally as abuse springing from an entitled worldview. Excellent essay." - so nothing anti-Caucasian there, either. The post itself, which is on the public internet, does mention race a few times, but focuses on gender.) Second, it tells me that the people preparing the complaint think that a white man's link to a white man's essay expressing opposition to the manifestos of mass murderer Elliot Rodger, mass murderer Marc Lépine, and James Damore is somehow either anti-Caucasian or anti-male (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they miscategorized it). Now, you may certainly argue that it's distasteful, unprofessional, unacceptable, and perhaps even unconscionable to have your coworkers compare you to two mass murderers simply for having written an article that (in their view) makes similar points. I'd certainly agree that there were and still are attacks on James Damore as an individual at Google. But that is in no way anti-white or anti-male, unless you think that the content of those manifestos, and (in two cases) their direct connection to mass murder, is somehow intrinsic to whiteness or maleness - which seems both wrong and a huge attack on white men, more than anything alleged in the complaint. Plenty of other posts are similarly not attacks on whiteness or maleness, many of which are miscategorized - other "anti-Caucasian postings" include someone writing that "the creator of Dilbert is ... a paranoid sexist dickbag", a link to an HBR article entitled "Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?", a truly awful-quality meme conveying "0 days since last ... white male says diversity isn't important," etc. Finally, remember that this is a lawsuit by one side, which has a story to tell. We don't know that we're not seeing a cherry-picked picture. Maybe these sorts of low-quality memes and overly-political posts on corporate channels affect everyone. It's certainly the case that shortly after Damore's suit, a story came out about an employee with rather diametrically opposed opinions being pushed out by management: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDwRdvdselVQmUwEjOFXGQ/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/15JokX8thp1TxG_I9aodYUxDw...

dang 9y ago

This was guaranteed to produce an off-topic flamewar, one which HN has already litigated to death and well into zombieland. Please don't do that here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

whatyoucantsay 9y ago
Hasn't the topic of the article already been "litigated to death" and been the subject of many flame wars? In what manner is that twitter link "off-topic" in the context of this article? Has the twitter link ever been discussed here rather than killed? I, for one, found it quite surprising. Based on news coverage and personal interactions with Googlers, I had no idea people were writing such things without reprimand from HR. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this link is the most substantive and thought-provoking comment in the entire thread.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  This is what I don't understand. I'm now being threatened with being banned while adamsea is getting a slap on the wrist. If you're only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN, why even allow the threads in the first place? I was responding to the question: > Could you elaborate on the form of the attacks on white people and men you're seeing in SV companies? What could I have done to answer that without posting some evidence?
  - dang 9y ago
    I answered you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062, which should clarify most of this. I can see why, before reading that, you might think this was a double standard, but it isn't. The reason is that adamsea hasn't been using HN primarily for political battle (though I grant you his account history is close to that, and a different moderator might have called it differently). The key word here is 'primarily', which is the test we use, as explained in that comment I just linked to. I didn't reply to you on the basis of one isolated comment but rather on your use of HN overall, which is what we care about. It's false, of course, that you're "only allowed to discuss one side of this topic without getting kicked off HN". If that were true, we wouldn't have flamewars, and boy do we have flamewars.