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Read https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol.... Then

• Miner49er 5y ago
  I don't think this is anything new for society. Companies have always fired people for going against the company too much or in the wrong way.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  >I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech, both as an industry and as a society. But the Damore incident is when I realized that we have. The tech industry was just an exception for a decade or so because it was fairly non-corporate. Go to any conservative law firm or traditional management and try to start a fiery political debate, and see how that goes. There was never any lively democratic discourse or tolerance in any corporate environment, or any other private environment for that matter, ask any gay person that's older than 25 and doesn't live in a liberal state. George Carlin made a career of saying 'shit' on television, that's how free-wheeling discourse was. Also as a sidenote on that Damore debacle, he got canned because of his presentation. You can cite 100 studies, when you start to argue that women drop out of high stress jobs because they're neurotic you might as well commit seppuku. He should have passed that manifesto by someone who isn't on the spectrum because anyone could have seen that trainwreck coming a mile away.
  • goldenchrome 5y ago
    For people like Damore, the hardest part of being on the spectrum is encountering non-autistic people.
  • pseudalopex 5y ago
    I know several people on the autism spectrum. They say Damore was an asshole. It frustrates them so many neurotypical people casually equate those things.
    • btilly 5y ago
      I know people with every combination of on/off the autism spectrum, who like/dislike Damore. Given that, anecdotes from any particular perspective aren't very telling.
      • pseudalopex 5y ago
        It isn't about liking or disliking Damore. It's about respecting the social intelligence of other people on the autism spectrum.
        • kragen 5y ago
          I respect the perceptual acuity of Daniel Kish. But I don't criticize blind people who aren't Daniel Kish for being bad at riding bicycles. In fact, I think people who criticize blind people for being bad at riding bicycles are assholes. So are people who think Daniel Kish shouldn't ride bicycles because he's blind. Criticizing autistic people for making social errors is similar to criticizing blind people for being bad at riding bicycles. Some blind people learn to ride bicycles, but most of them are bad at it. Some of them, like Daniel Kish, are really good at it. Some autistic people learn to interact fluently in neurotypical society. Some of them are really good at it. But some of us aren't, because of our autism, and a lot of us never even learn to speak. So, fuck you. I hope you die in a fire. People like you have intermittently made my life miserable since before I learned to speak.
• chmod600 5y ago
  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all the people doing the canceling are right and all the people being canceled are wrong. Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse. Even the most well-intentioned will fail to learn when they are afraid of expressing the wrong answer. Try to teach someone mathematics where every time they get the wrong answer, they get shocked. Not a good learning environment. And that's exactly what we have now. Repeat a few buzzwords and you are safe. But when problems manifest in a new way, you won't be able to understand or correct them because you don't really understand. Being wrong is part of the path to being right. If you are cancelled for being wrong, you'll never be right. You'll just have to be quiet.
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    >Cancel culture will make racism and sexism worse. I completely agree with that. Just to keep an eye on matters, and you never know how you need to set up your life going forward, lately I've made an attempt to eavesdrop on snatches of private conversations. I'm blown away by how radicalized people are becoming, and not in a way that progressives would like. Formerly, these people were essentially indifferent. Now, not so much.
    • mrbadideas 5y ago
      Yes 10000x.
    • potatoineyes 5y ago
      I don't literally think all liberal fundamentalists or lgbt people, for example, should die, but I do think organising around that as a heuristic principle for action would be better for the future, myself and for society. This is a direct result of having previvous liberal adjacent beliefs eroded and destroyed by constantly being around people who believe them, being 3xpos3d to the arguments for them, the data for them, etc - none of it is convincing to me at all and I am shocked how I took it all on faith as a child and teen. Contact with liberal and liberal adjacent groups has also shown me in personal experience that the stereotypes are often true, and they are truely awful vile hateful people if they do not think you are one of them. I would not be able to, on moral grounds, oppose large swathes of my country being literally exterminated because I no longer have any faith that they are not an existential threat. I really don't know how to fix this situation.
• dgs_sgd 5y ago
  The irony of the response to that memo, and to cancel culture more widely, is that reasonable people who read it and don't agree with everything it says, but at least agree that some of it is worthy of discussion, are more likely to be radicalized than side with the cancelers. The diversity and inclusion mob is tolerant of diversity only when it satisfies their narrow definition of what that is.
• RC_ITR 5y ago
  >I don't know how or when we lost tolerance for free speech I think you're confusing lost tolerance for free speech with 'raising the value of the speech of traditionally marginalized groups.' A man at Atari in 1976 who argues women are worse engineers than men mostly broadcasts to an audience of empowered men and disempowered women. So his 'free speech' is respected while those women's is not. A man at Google in 2018 who argues the same thing has to deal with the consequences of women's speech, but to him, that feels like a chilling of his free speech. I'm fine that we are in scenario 2, having listened to a lot of other ill-informed white men give heir 'opinion' on things for no true reason.
  • btilly 5y ago
    Honest question. Have you ever actually read the memo? If you have, please tell me what passage makes you think that it says that women are worse engineers than men. Because as far as I can tell, there are none. The topic at hand is controversial enough WITHOUT making up stuff about what was said.
    • RC_ITR 5y ago
      Honest question, have you? >humans are generally biased towards protecting females. >These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics >This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. >Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average I think the disconnect here is that the author is couching his claims with strawmen 'women prefer' and links to small-n surveys that you find sufficient (but most do not). Maybe if we refactored some of what he said, it would make sense: > people who excel at math are generally biased toward being short and unfriendly. >These two differences in part explain why STEM students relatively prefer working long-hours and avoiding meaningful human connection. More liberal arts students may like socializing because it requires EQ and even within startups, comparatively more PMs and SDRs have significant others. >This leads to engineers generally having a harder time receiving criticism, asking for help, staying out of others business, and collaborating. >Engineers on average look for peer praise while SDRs have a higher drive for wealth accumulation.
• deleted 5y ago
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• raclage 5y ago
  I don't understand why Damore is the hill people are always trying to die on. He didn't publish that in the marketplace of ideas. He sent it to his coworkers, using company resources, on company time. Your workplace has never been a free speech bastion. Any person may or may not like that but it's been true forever so I'm not sure how it indicates that free speech is now in some sort of novel danger.
  • dgs_sgd 5y ago
    It's because he published a memo pertinent to a hot topic at the company and rather than engage him on the merits of his ideas leadership decided to fire him. Is it unsettling that the employees at a company with a global monopoly on information retrieval seem to not tolerate dissent within their ranks?
  • ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
    Have you read the Damore memo? It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity, given the data showing that most women are choosing to not go into engineering-like fields, rather than being forced out of them. It's a corporate policy proposal, and it was posted to a private internal board of people interested in how to shape Google corporate policy to increase diversity. Sort of a workgroup. In a sane world, that's exactly the sort of workplace discussion one would want.
    • jellicle 5y ago
      > It is fundamentally about how Google should increase diversity Well, it was fundamentally about how Google should stop all efforts to recruit or promote women or non-white men, because Damore believed those efforts were "discrimination" against himself.
      • ryeights 5y ago
        Come on now.
        • 5y ago
• asciimike 5y ago
  Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/ We haven't lost our tolerance for free speech, we've lost our tolerance for listening to people who claim society has to listen to their bullshit because of the first amendment rather than because they present a compelling argument in a positive way.
  • TeeMassive 5y ago
    The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around. Open discourse can exist as a value too. And Google, one of the most influential entity in the US and the world, has decided that it's not something that should be promoted. Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China. But let's not fool ourselves about who's on the right side of history.
    • asciimike 5y ago
      > The only people bringing up the free speech argument are the people defending Google, not the other way around. Quoting the OP, "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Damore, he was engaged in free speech." This sounds like it refutes your statement, no? Having worked there when this happened, the discourse definitely felt like, "Google is stifling the free speech of one of their employees" vs "Google has the right to fire employees for any reason." > Open discourse can exist as a value too It does (are we not engaging in it right now?). There were (and I assume still are) plenty of random internal mailing lists where those types of discussions happened. I mostly stayed away from them because my goal at Google was to build cool products, not waste my day on internal mailing lists; I prefer to go to HN to do that. > Just as LeBron James has the right to defend the genocidal regime of China. I guess the NBA and China is the Godwin's law equivalent for free speech. He has the legal right to say what he wants, he doesn't have the right to have what he says have zero consequences (which is what the comic says). You argue that he doesn't have a choice, but he does: he can speak his mind and potentially lose access to his largest market; he's just unwilling to do that because he deems the economic ramifications are too large. You always have a choice, most just choose to not make the hard one.
• mleonhard 5y ago
  Damore said that men are better engineers than women. That is false. It is also incompatible with an organization that tries to be diverse and inclusive. That's the main reason he was fired. Getting fired for insulting your co-workers is not censorship. In society today, we have a "paradox of tolerance". If we tolerate everything, then we tolerate people being intolerant, and many people in our society will suffer. So we must be intolerant of intolerance. This is the only way to build a society of equality and justice.
  • errantmind 5y ago
    Ironically, the paradox of tolerance is often used to justify attacking almost any opposing view, as almost any view can be framed as some form of intolerance. I believe the paradox of tolerance as a useful idea is empty and bunk
  • btilly 5y ago
    Damore said that men are better engineers than women. That is false. Please go to https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol... and come back quoting his exact words on that topic. We'll wait. Oh, right. You can't. Because he never said that, nor did he say anything that amounted to that. When it comes to false claims, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and all that.