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Damore was character assassinated via leaks and libel, yes. Pragmatically, he could have prevented his fate if he took the opportunity to back down when challen

Damore was character assassinated via leaks and libel, yes. Pragmatically, he could have prevented his fate if he took the opportunity to back down when challenged by corporate, instead of defending his right to free honest speech at a megacorp. He erroneously thought that because controversial party-line free-speech was job-safe even when intellectually dishonest, that controversial anti-party-line free speech was also job-safe.

rbanffy 6y ago
The character assassination weapon was his own memo and opinions, stated over and over by himself. It's character suicide.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  The repeated false claims about statements in the memo and abbreviated versions shared don't count as character assassination?
- afiori 6y ago
  except for the fact that almost all controversial statements attributed to the memo are projections. In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    That would have been a great thing for the memo to say. That's not what the memo said. Instead, the memo claimed women were on average more neurotic.
    - afiori 6y ago
      Neuroticism is is a personality trait, others are Obsessionality, Psychoticism, Disinhibition, Impulsivity, Rigidity, Alexithymia, Perfectionism, Sensory processing sensitivity, Novelty seeking, Harm avoidance, Self-esteem, Honesty-humility, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience. I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other. Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse. The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender. We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        > The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender. That's two paragraphs of the memo in the middle and the bit at the end. Most of the memo is setting up a case for fundamental differences in gender, strawman depictions of the "morality of Google," a claim that men have a higher drive for status (which is, fundamentally, the sort of thing that a company would be put immediately in violation of Title VII if it agreed with), and a claim that Google's anti-discriminatory practices are discriminatory.

rbanffy 6y ago

The character assassination weapon was his own memo and opinions, stated over and over by himself. It's character suicide.

oh_sigh 6y ago
The repeated false claims about statements in the memo and abbreviated versions shared don't count as character assassination?
afiori 6y ago
except for the fact that almost all controversial statements attributed to the memo are projections. In practice the entire content of that document sums up to "Since current diversity efforts are not solving the problem it could be time to admit that the current google structure is on average slightly less attractive or rewarding for women (or for individual in a slice of the population that contains slightly more women than men)" together with some suggestions of what those changes could be.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  That would have been a great thing for the memo to say. That's not what the memo said. Instead, the memo claimed women were on average more neurotic.
  - afiori 6y ago
    Neuroticism is is a personality trait, others are Obsessionality, Psychoticism, Disinhibition, Impulsivity, Rigidity, Alexithymia, Perfectionism, Sensory processing sensitivity, Novelty seeking, Harm avoidance, Self-esteem, Honesty-humility, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Openness to experience. I guess that a good deal of them are measurably more prevalent in one gender/sex or the other. Damore point is that if you design a highly competitive system so that Quality A is rewarded but Quality B is ignored you are going to have an imbalanced workplace if women on average have slightly more B and less A than the mean and men the reverse. The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender. We should design our systems so that the minuscule differences between men and women are not overly amplified and not abused, not just pretend that those differences do not exist.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      > The only content of the memo are suggestion on how a workplace could be both fair and more naturally 50/50 by gender. That's two paragraphs of the memo in the middle and the bit at the end. Most of the memo is setting up a case for fundamental differences in gender, strawman depictions of the "morality of Google," a claim that men have a higher drive for status (which is, fundamentally, the sort of thing that a company would be put immediately in violation of Title VII if it agreed with), and a claim that Google's anti-discriminatory practices are discriminatory.