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It's annoying that Bloomberg refers to the memo as being "political" and expressing "political conservatism". The memo was attempting to explain the underrepres

It's annoying that Bloomberg refers to the memo as being "political" and expressing "political conservatism". The memo was attempting to explain the underrepresentation of women in tech via biological differences. That has literally nothing to do with politics, and framing it as such misrepresents and discredits the contents of the memo.

ashtonkem 6y ago
I think that’s extremely short sighted. Gender politics is politics; anything that comes close to the subject is either already political or will become political extremely quickly.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  > Gender politics is politics I don't understand how that statement discredits anything I said. Politics is peoples' opinions and is subjective/normative (eg. things "ought" to be this way). Science attempts to explain how nature works (eg. this is why things are this way), and is objective. That memo was not political.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Politics is about how resources should be spent, not how things “ought” to be. Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political, especially about something as charged as gender, no matter how much science you may cite.
    - JSavageOne 6y ago
      > Politics is about how resources should be spent > how things “ought” to be Those are the same thing. > Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political Yes if his memo was a paragraph saying "We should change our gender policy to X, Y, and Z", then yes it would be political. Instead it is a 10 page document explaining how biological differences may explain gender imbalances, and the implications of this. But sure if you want to dismiss it as "politics", then I guess there's no reasoning with you.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        I don’t dismiss things by calling them political, although apparently you do. I just think it’s insanely naive to believe that you can write a 10 page document on a gender related company policy and not have it become political quickly. You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. Whether or not that was his original intent doesn’t really matter, the interpretation of his post was both predictable and understandable. He should’ve seen that coming, and to argue that he was just apolitically interested in the science of gender is disingenuous.
        JSavageOne 6y ago
        > You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. The memo certainly challenged Google's corporate policy. So what? You think anyone who has an opposing view on a corporate policy and can back their view up with facts and evidence should be fired? Personally I'm not big on authoritarianism/totalitarianism, but maybe that's just me.
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        You’re absolutely making up my point, which is extremely annoying. All I’m saying is that arguing about policy is politics. That’s it.
    - piflon 6y ago
      Decisions about resources make no sense except in the context of trying to achieve some effect. Political issues are almost always implicitly about how things "ought" to be; the resource decisions are in service of those goals.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        Resource allocation is more concrete and direct than discussions about how society ought to be arranged, although you’re right that you allocate resources in order to achieve a desired social outcome. Discussions about how society ought to be tend to be vague and aspirational: “society ought to be more just” is more vague than “we should spend more money on these programs”. The latter might serve the former, but it’s also specific and actionable, which is why I draw the distinction where I do.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  But that's surely not true. Programs to encourage women in software engineering are generally seen as apolitical. (And that's not a judo move or anything - they get broad bipartisan support whenever it comes up in Congress.)
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    They’re just popular politics. Also, if Congress weighs in on something, isn’t it de-facto political?
glenda 6y ago
I don’t see what’s wrong with calling it political... it surely isn’t scientific. The opinions he expressed seem like naive political theories based on his understanding of gender and society, which is an extremely nuanced topic.
- twomoretime 6y ago
  What's naive is bending over backwards to pretend that men and women are identical, after millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution. It's absurd that this is even a debate in our society. Scientific? Everything we know about genetics, hormones, and psychology clearly points to gendered differences and if you objectively look at the data, at the very least you must concede that you cannot conflate inequality of outcomes with inequality of outcome opportunity without gratuitous handwaving. Progressivism in the US takes as a given that men in the past were backwards and ignorant - but there are literally tens of thousands of years of social wisdom in history that are being thrown away because people can't handle the fact that in this world there are no guarantees of equal ability across groups. Anyone who is offended by such a notion is hopelessly naive - but I suppose you can hardly blame someone after spending a lifetime indoctrinated to pretend that gendered differences magically disappear above the shoulders.
  - glenda 6y ago
    I never mentioned any of the theories in your response. There are all kinds of people who study gender in society from every possible angle, Damore doesn’t strike me as an expert in the field. Just a typical engineer who thinks he knows everything.
    - twomoretime 6y ago
      This appeal to authority is enormously frustrating when the authorities are also blindly political. Think for yourself. The physical differences between men and women are patently obvious, and how they translate to different performance in sports is clear. We understand why men and women are different physically - because specialization had strong selective pressure. Now why on earth would this specialization only apply to physical differences? And if you're still not convinced, and if the consistent studies showing differences in verbal/spatial IQ and the like aren't enough, how can we use brainscans to differentiate between cis and trans people? This is literally only political because, for this issue, one side in western politics is determined to deny reality in order to shape the world into what they think it should be. That's childish idealism - you cannot solve a "problem" without addressing it's actual causes.
ravenstine 6y ago
Is this what conservatism actually is, now? I'm just wondering because, although I agree that nothing Damore said was conservative in a traditional sense, maybe conservatism has just been made more broad in recent years. For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things. There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified. EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  This is tribal politics. If you're not with us, you must be in the other tribe. Reasoned ideology has long ago left the room. This goes for both tribes, of course. With some exceptions on both sides.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Yea I'm about the farthest left on the political spectrum as one can get without being outright communist, so it's hilarious if anyone calls me "conservative" for thinking that maybe just maybe biology influences our life choices, and that people should have the freedom to express their opinions and debate issues without being censored or shamed for having contrarian viewpoints (kind of like what the memo, which is titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", talks about, and which ironically got the author fired).
- 6y ago
wpietri 6y ago
That has everything to do with politics. Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics. Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power. For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  So what are you trying to say, we shouldn't be allowed to talk about gender differences? There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor). James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do. Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon. In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority. I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763412001510?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
Reedx 6y ago
Biology has become politicized like climate science did. With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.
- nahname 6y ago
  This is a sad truth
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  That's a fantastic analogy. Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics. Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions. That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces. > “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky
UncleMeat 6y ago
The nazis claimed that jews had biological differences. Slaveowners claimed that black people had biological differences. Heck, denying women the right to vote was justified by claimed biological differences. Oppressors don’t exactly have a history of saying “yeah we are doing this for evil reasons.” Instead they hide behind bogus arguments to justify why their behavior is actually good for those they harm. “We should change how we hire women because of structural differences between men and women” is not only a political statement but one that comes with centuries of baggage attached.
- JSavageOne 6y ago
  Here's my response to a similar sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126109 Please tell me which of Damore's recommendations amounted to opression. I see "we can make software engineering more people-oriented" and "allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive". Nowhere do I see anything even remotely comparable to Nazi treatment of jews or denying women the right to vote. In fact his suggestions attempt to improve the workplace satisfaction of women.
- abstractbarista 6y ago
  The thing is, they were all right. Everyone does have differences. They just weren't right about the consequences of those differences. If you look at how we hire women today, it's clear that your quote accurately describes current reality. Men and women are attracted and hired differently today. If you disagree with this, you are choosing to ignore the biases every human possesses.
tomohawk 6y ago
Well, it is political. A number of people and groups have staked a position that is directly contrary to the views expressed in that document. They cannot afford to be proven wrong. When people feel threatened in that way, they attack. It really doesn't matter how much evidence backs his view or not. It doesn't matter how much logic he mustered or didn't.
n4r9 6y ago
The memo was undoubtedly political; it claimed that Google has an inherent left-leaning bias and that this blinds it to the facts.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I think that’s extremely short sighted. Gender politics is politics; anything that comes close to the subject is either already political or will become political extremely quickly.

JSavageOne 6y ago
> Gender politics is politics I don't understand how that statement discredits anything I said. Politics is peoples' opinions and is subjective/normative (eg. things "ought" to be this way). Science attempts to explain how nature works (eg. this is why things are this way), and is objective. That memo was not political.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Politics is about how resources should be spent, not how things “ought” to be. Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political, especially about something as charged as gender, no matter how much science you may cite.
  - JSavageOne 6y ago
    > Politics is about how resources should be spent > how things “ought” to be Those are the same thing. > Posting a disagreement about policy is inherently political Yes if his memo was a paragraph saying "We should change our gender policy to X, Y, and Z", then yes it would be political. Instead it is a 10 page document explaining how biological differences may explain gender imbalances, and the implications of this. But sure if you want to dismiss it as "politics", then I guess there's no reasoning with you.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      I don’t dismiss things by calling them political, although apparently you do. I just think it’s insanely naive to believe that you can write a 10 page document on a gender related company policy and not have it become political quickly. You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. Whether or not that was his original intent doesn’t really matter, the interpretation of his post was both predictable and understandable. He should’ve seen that coming, and to argue that he was just apolitically interested in the science of gender is disingenuous.
      - JSavageOne 6y ago
        > You can’t post a 10 document article in response to a corporate policy about gender in hiring and not expect that to be interpreted as an argument against said policy. The memo certainly challenged Google's corporate policy. So what? You think anyone who has an opposing view on a corporate policy and can back their view up with facts and evidence should be fired? Personally I'm not big on authoritarianism/totalitarianism, but maybe that's just me.
        ashtonkem 6y ago
        You’re absolutely making up my point, which is extremely annoying. All I’m saying is that arguing about policy is politics. That’s it.
  - piflon 6y ago
    Decisions about resources make no sense except in the context of trying to achieve some effect. Political issues are almost always implicitly about how things "ought" to be; the resource decisions are in service of those goals.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Resource allocation is more concrete and direct than discussions about how society ought to be arranged, although you’re right that you allocate resources in order to achieve a desired social outcome. Discussions about how society ought to be tend to be vague and aspirational: “society ought to be more just” is more vague than “we should spend more money on these programs”. The latter might serve the former, but it’s also specific and actionable, which is why I draw the distinction where I do.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
But that's surely not true. Programs to encourage women in software engineering are generally seen as apolitical. (And that's not a judo move or anything - they get broad bipartisan support whenever it comes up in Congress.)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  They’re just popular politics. Also, if Congress weighs in on something, isn’t it de-facto political?

glenda 6y ago

I don’t see what’s wrong with calling it political... it surely isn’t scientific. The opinions he expressed seem like naive political theories based on his understanding of gender and society, which is an extremely nuanced topic.

twomoretime 6y ago
What's naive is bending over backwards to pretend that men and women are identical, after millions of years of sexually dimorphic evolution. It's absurd that this is even a debate in our society. Scientific? Everything we know about genetics, hormones, and psychology clearly points to gendered differences and if you objectively look at the data, at the very least you must concede that you cannot conflate inequality of outcomes with inequality of outcome opportunity without gratuitous handwaving. Progressivism in the US takes as a given that men in the past were backwards and ignorant - but there are literally tens of thousands of years of social wisdom in history that are being thrown away because people can't handle the fact that in this world there are no guarantees of equal ability across groups. Anyone who is offended by such a notion is hopelessly naive - but I suppose you can hardly blame someone after spending a lifetime indoctrinated to pretend that gendered differences magically disappear above the shoulders.
- glenda 6y ago
  I never mentioned any of the theories in your response. There are all kinds of people who study gender in society from every possible angle, Damore doesn’t strike me as an expert in the field. Just a typical engineer who thinks he knows everything.
  - twomoretime 6y ago
    This appeal to authority is enormously frustrating when the authorities are also blindly political. Think for yourself. The physical differences between men and women are patently obvious, and how they translate to different performance in sports is clear. We understand why men and women are different physically - because specialization had strong selective pressure. Now why on earth would this specialization only apply to physical differences? And if you're still not convinced, and if the consistent studies showing differences in verbal/spatial IQ and the like aren't enough, how can we use brainscans to differentiate between cis and trans people? This is literally only political because, for this issue, one side in western politics is determined to deny reality in order to shape the world into what they think it should be. That's childish idealism - you cannot solve a "problem" without addressing it's actual causes.

ravenstine 6y ago

Is this what conservatism actually is, now? I'm just wondering because, although I agree that nothing Damore said was conservative in a traditional sense, maybe conservatism has just been made more broad in recent years. For instance, I don't believe that I'm conservative at all, but my liberal friends and family tend to classify me as "conservative". I find it baffling because most of my beliefs are pretty permissive. Ask me about any individual stance, and I can assure you that the answer will most likely be a liberal one. But I'm considered "conservative" because my ideas are not all Liberal(with a capital-L). For instance, there's nothing particularly conservative about believing that biological sex has a determining(or at least predicting) factor on a person's behavior and preferences, yet because this is a stance that today's Liberalism looks down upon, it's considered de facto conservative merely on that basis. The same goes for things like libertarianism and having negative conclusions about socialism. They don't really have anything to do with being conservative in isolation, but if they aren't Liberal then they can only be conservative, in accordance with how the establishment media judge these things. There needs to be a different word than conservatism for having positions that aren't part of the Liberal platform, but "conservative" works well from an optics perspective because it's been effectively vilified. EDIT: LOL Am I being downvoted because I said people think I'm conservative? One of you people please tell me.

BurningFrog 6y ago
This is tribal politics. If you're not with us, you must be in the other tribe. Reasoned ideology has long ago left the room. This goes for both tribes, of course. With some exceptions on both sides.
JSavageOne 6y ago
Yea I'm about the farthest left on the political spectrum as one can get without being outright communist, so it's hilarious if anyone calls me "conservative" for thinking that maybe just maybe biology influences our life choices, and that people should have the freedom to express their opinions and debate issues without being censored or shamed for having contrarian viewpoints (kind of like what the memo, which is titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber", talks about, and which ironically got the author fired).
6y ago

wpietri 6y ago

That has everything to do with politics. Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics. Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power. For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.

JSavageOne 6y ago
So what are you trying to say, we shouldn't be allowed to talk about gender differences? There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor). James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do. Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon. In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority. I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763412001510?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...

Reedx 6y ago

Biology has become politicized like climate science did. With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.

nahname 6y ago
This is a sad truth
JSavageOne 6y ago
That's a fantastic analogy. Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics. Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions. That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces. > “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky

UncleMeat 6y ago

The nazis claimed that jews had biological differences. Slaveowners claimed that black people had biological differences. Heck, denying women the right to vote was justified by claimed biological differences. Oppressors don’t exactly have a history of saying “yeah we are doing this for evil reasons.” Instead they hide behind bogus arguments to justify why their behavior is actually good for those they harm. “We should change how we hire women because of structural differences between men and women” is not only a political statement but one that comes with centuries of baggage attached.

JSavageOne 6y ago
Here's my response to a similar sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23126109 Please tell me which of Damore's recommendations amounted to opression. I see "we can make software engineering more people-oriented" and "allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive". Nowhere do I see anything even remotely comparable to Nazi treatment of jews or denying women the right to vote. In fact his suggestions attempt to improve the workplace satisfaction of women.
abstractbarista 6y ago
The thing is, they were all right. Everyone does have differences. They just weren't right about the consequences of those differences. If you look at how we hire women today, it's clear that your quote accurately describes current reality. Men and women are attracted and hired differently today. If you disagree with this, you are choosing to ignore the biases every human possesses.

tomohawk 6y ago

Well, it is political. A number of people and groups have staked a position that is directly contrary to the views expressed in that document. They cannot afford to be proven wrong. When people feel threatened in that way, they attack. It really doesn't matter how much evidence backs his view or not. It doesn't matter how much logic he mustered or didn't.

n4r9 6y ago

The memo was undoubtedly political; it claimed that Google has an inherent left-leaning bias and that this blinds it to the facts.