Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true. It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal abou

Sigh. As the sibling comment points out, what you are saying is not true. It is contradicted by the text of the memo itself. Moreover he wasn't "very vocal about it", he wrote a memo that was then deliberately leaked by his ideological opponents in order to destroy his career: successfully so. Five years ago I felt my political views were pretty mainstream for the tech industry, for the Valley (although I did not live there). I'd have described myself as a centrist or maybe centre-left. These days my views have shifted, I can feel myself getting more conservative with time. It's not an age thing. It's more that I've started to notice the sort of tactic you used above - faced with someone making conservative arguments you disagree with you didn't bother debating the points he made. Instead you just lied about what he said and then attacked a straw man. This is consistently how Damore is treated. There are liberal arguments that can be made about what he wrote - people could point out methodological errors in his studies, or logic errors in his arguments. But they never seem to do that. Whether it's in the media (who love calling what he wrote an "anti diversity memo" even though it praises diversity and has ideas for how to increase the number of women in tech), or on Hacker News, the tactic is always the same - pretend he claimed women are worse than men and then viciously attack him on a personal level. And it's just totally false. The same tactic crops up in other similar contexts. Jordan Peterson being interviewed on Channel 4 is a recent notorious example. The guy made debatable but essentially conservative arguments about how men and women are not the same, the gender pay gap has multiple causes and so on. And Cathy Newman (the interviewer), who clearly isn't really interviewing him at all but rather sees her job as destroying the ideological enemy, just constantly twists his words. The entire interview consists of her exclaiming, "So what you're saying is ..." followed by some absurd straw man that bore no resemblance to what the guy just said. It got so insane that by the end of the interview, after Peterson made a long and complicated point about the biological roots of social hierarchies using the nervous system of lobsters as an example, she replied "So what you're saying is, we should organise our society along the lines of the lobsters" and the guy doesn't even blink or miss his stride. He just gets right on with correcting her, because by that point the lying and distorting of what he just said has become so predictable: https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s https://youtu.be/aMcjxSThD54?t=26m55s It's one of the most astonishing TV interviews I've ever seen and that sort of debating "tactic" is everywhere.