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This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his Line

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore? It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

mtrovo 1y ago
[flagged]
- jglamine 1y ago
  No, and you can see my post history to verify this.
jeffbee 1y ago
Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.
- jglamine 1y ago
  I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes. I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life. After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely. But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
  - acdha 1y ago
    > was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified. If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it. (To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important) 1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9 https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
    - llm_nerd 1y ago
      Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but- "that women were innately less qualified" He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset. His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole. NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on. Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was. You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive. I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.
- llm_nerd 1y ago
  >Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you. This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff. Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.
- arduanika 1y ago
  Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent. HTH.
    - arduanika 1y ago
      Hmm, so which of those three cases are we in? To his critics, his gender sure doesn't seem irrelevant, and in fact the whole gist of his odd appearance in TFA is to lump him together with all males, who the author sees as "more or less all the same person". And his gender is certainly not unknown. Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers? Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases? HTH indeed. FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.
eej71 1y ago
The Free Press recently did an interview with him. https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication-trump-musk https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication... Basically he has kept a very low profile.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Nothing screams "merit" like retiring to Luxembourg after having never had a real job.
  - jglamine 1y ago
    This is speculation, but I suspect he may have gotten a settlement from Google. Any settlement would likely include a gag-order. It would explain the early retirement + lack of work history. But yes, family money is also a possibility.
- layer8 1y ago
  Paywalled, unfortunately.
- tristor 1y ago
  I would love to read it but it's paywalled behind a subscription and they've been able to break the way archivers like archive.is strip paywalls.
g_sch 1y ago
The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.
- jglamine 1y ago
  IDk, I feel like they're doing the thing where you list people they don't like, then list other worse people and kind of imply the first set are related / just as bad as the second set. It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".
- arduanika 1y ago
  Maybe the author just forgot which three interchangeable white guys he named at the top of the article, up there with the DEI topic that he broached but then never came back to. Maybe he thought he had written "Elon Musk", about whom the bad father parallel is a little easier to insinuate from the public record. Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???). After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one? Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.
BergAndCo 1y ago
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mtrovo 1y ago

[flagged]

jglamine 1y ago
No, and you can see my post history to verify this.

jeffbee 1y ago

Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.

jglamine 1y ago
I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes. I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life. After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely. But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
- acdha 1y ago
  > was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified. If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it. (To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important) 1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9 https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-damores-google-memo/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
  - llm_nerd 1y ago
    Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but- "that women were innately less qualified" He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset. His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole. NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on. Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was. You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive. I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.
llm_nerd 1y ago
>Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you. This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff. Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.
arduanika 1y ago
Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?
- jeffbee 1y ago
  You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent. HTH.
  - arduanika 1y ago
    Hmm, so which of those three cases are we in? To his critics, his gender sure doesn't seem irrelevant, and in fact the whole gist of his odd appearance in TFA is to lump him together with all males, who the author sees as "more or less all the same person". And his gender is certainly not unknown. Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers? Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases? HTH indeed. FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.

eej71 1y ago

The Free Press recently did an interview with him. https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication-trump-musk https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication... Basically he has kept a very low profile.

jeffbee 1y ago
Nothing screams "merit" like retiring to Luxembourg after having never had a real job.
- jglamine 1y ago
  This is speculation, but I suspect he may have gotten a settlement from Google. Any settlement would likely include a gag-order. It would explain the early retirement + lack of work history. But yes, family money is also a possibility.
layer8 1y ago
Paywalled, unfortunately.
tristor 1y ago
I would love to read it but it's paywalled behind a subscription and they've been able to break the way archivers like archive.is strip paywalls.

g_sch 1y ago

The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.

jglamine 1y ago
IDk, I feel like they're doing the thing where you list people they don't like, then list other worse people and kind of imply the first set are related / just as bad as the second set. It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".
arduanika 1y ago
Maybe the author just forgot which three interchangeable white guys he named at the top of the article, up there with the DEI topic that he broached but then never came back to. Maybe he thought he had written "Elon Musk", about whom the bad father parallel is a little easier to insinuate from the public record. Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???). After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one? Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.

BergAndCo 1y ago

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