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Thought Police

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Re: Thought Police

#21

Post by sever5 »

avs733 wrote: post #11
theandrewbailey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how Edward spread his ideas. He was fired because he had a thoughtcrime.

No, he was fired because he was speaking about things he is not an expert and was a dick about it and made his company look bad. Imagine if Damore (sorry...Edward) had been forced to accept some social scientist's interpretation of computer science. The uproar would be unimaginable. Knowledge and expertise is transferable to aid in developing understanding of a new area of thought, however knowledge and expertise in…

> it and made his company look bad

This may have been a nuance James missed, Google is open to _external_ social woes.

Re: Thought Police

#22

Post by rbanffy »

zamalek wrote: post #20
icthysilia wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like The Google Memo has become this kind of litmus test for understanding workplace social dynamics, and ironically, is one of the reasons for emphasizing things like diversity, etc. The reason this person was fired was not because of the argument they outlined, but because they communicated this position via a long, widespread memo without appreciating the ramifications of doing so. The "hostile workplace en…

> when it was practically relevant I can completely agree with this. It was a very disruptive (not the good kind) message - he likely exasperated the problems that quotas cause for other employees. The article mentions that the diversity manager should also be sacked and, while I never like to imply that should be done, someone did hand Edward a loaded gun; a person that was hired to prevent situations like that from…

I don't think anyone should expect the VP of diversity to be able to successfully prevent any sufficiently intelligent and determined engineer from making a mess.

It's an inherently unfair game. It doesn't matter how many crisis did she prevent, she didn't prevent one and that should not be enough to fire her.

Having said that, I assume this was not the first time he expressed his opinions about diversity hiring. The company should keep an eye on this kind of sentiment and use the information to guide its own behavior. If I knew diversity hires were creating such perceptions, I'd boost internal campaigns to better inform the workforce of the methods and intended results, as well as publish indicators that allow a fair assessment of its results.

I don't think, for a second, the bar was lowered. It's just that there is more than one bar.

Re: Thought Police

#23

Post by nancye »

rednerrus wrote: post #7
rbanffy wrote: post #3

It's... more complicated than that. Had Edward used the proper internal channels, his bad ideas would have reached the people in charge of policies and he'd have a chance to debate them and be proven wrong. When proved wrong, he'd adjust his mental models of the world in accordance with what he learned. It's entirely possible this happened and he just didn't change his mind. Unfortunately, Edward decided to try to st…

Isn't working with people you disagree with part of corporate life? Do you think there are no conservative people at your company who have to deal with the incessant anti-conservative tech culture? I assume that occasionally they want to punch us in our faces. They show up for work and get their jobs done. The problem with enforcing these policies when we agree with them is we have to enforce them when we don't agree…

Equal employment laws and anti-discrimination statutes are real things, and they spell out which groups are protected classes - those based on race, sex, religion, disability, etc. Your workplace is not your living room, and not all ideas and behaviors are equally acceptable. I don't believe conservatives should be discriminated against, but when "conservative" becomes a euphemism for pro-white/anti-semitic/misogynistic beliefs, then you may find yourself running afoul of laws or corporate guidelines because those things are not on the same level as "should taxes be higher or lower" or "what's the right level of environmental regulation."

Re: Thought Police

#24

Post by devnull791101 »

richmarr wrote: post #10
rednerrus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't working with people you disagree with part of corporate life? Do you think there are no conservative people at your company who have to deal with the incessant anti-conservative tech culture? I assume that occasionally they want to punch us in our faces. They show up for work and get their jobs done. The problem with enforcing these policies when we agree with them is we have to enforce them when we don't agree…

> ...incessant anti-conservative tech culture Not sure I'd silo this as a tech culture thing. Education has been shown to negatively correlate with conservatism so it'd be reasonable to expect to see low numbers of conservatives in any field with higher educational barriers. http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-g...

except in UK, where the poor and uneducated are stereotypically labour/democrat supporters, wealthy educated types are tory/conservative.

Re: Thought Police

#25

Post by xiaoma »

avs733 wrote: post #9

Whenever possible I rely on folks who are better writers than me to express ideas I agree with. This is one of those cases. From a journalist I respect: "k, let's nip this in the bud right now: James Damore is not a whistleblower, just as any other sniveling white dudes crying about the presence of people of color and/or women at their workplace are also not whistleblowers. Having personal biases and misogynistic vie…

If you're using phrases like "sniveling white dudes", you're part of the problem.

Re: Thought Police

#26

Post by Edmond »

devnull791101 wrote: post #24
richmarr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...incessant anti-conservative tech culture Not sure I'd silo this as a tech culture thing. Education has been shown to negatively correlate with conservatism so it'd be reasonable to expect to see low numbers of conservatives in any field with higher educational barriers. http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-g...

except in UK, where the poor and uneducated are stereotypically labour/democrat supporters, wealthy educated types are tory/conservative.

That use to be true in the US too and in some ways still is...but the US also has the race issue which tends to further complicate everything. Working class whites use to be democrats for economic reasons (labor) while still being socially conservative, now they're almost entirely republican and mostly it seems for social (really, ethnic) reasons.

In the US republican affiliation is (or used to be) actually more closely tied with college education and higher income and that is the "fiscal conservatism" (basically lower taxes). Of course higher education levels and income also correlate quite closely with ethnicity and whites are mostly republicans....

Basically the political divisions have become quite ethnically polarized so the usual correlation between actual socio-economic interest and party affiliation don't hold the way one would expect.

Re: Thought Police

#27

Post by nicolashahn »

The author left out the part where the large tech blog takes Edward's words and unabashedly misrepresents them, distorting "ERUs policy of giving preference to short people is discriminatory and harmful to the company" to "I think short people are inferior to tall people" in order to create outrage where there otherwise wouldn't have been and advance their own agenda.

Re: Thought Police

#28

Post by avs733 »

xiaoma wrote: post #25
avs733 wrote: post #9

Whenever possible I rely on folks who are better writers than me to express ideas I agree with. This is one of those cases. From a journalist I respect: "k, let's nip this in the bud right now: James Damore is not a whistleblower, just as any other sniveling white dudes crying about the presence of people of color and/or women at their workplace are also not whistleblowers. Having personal biases and misogynistic vie…

If you're using phrases like "sniveling white dudes", you're part of the problem.

naming behavior what it is is the problem?

Re: Thought Police

#29

Post by rkeene2 »

rbanffy wrote: post #22
zamalek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when it was practically relevant I can completely agree with this. It was a very disruptive (not the good kind) message - he likely exasperated the problems that quotas cause for other employees. The article mentions that the diversity manager should also be sacked and, while I never like to imply that should be done, someone did hand Edward a loaded gun; a person that was hired to prevent situations like that from…

I don't think anyone should expect the VP of diversity to be able to successfully prevent any sufficiently intelligent and determined engineer from making a mess. It's an inherently unfair game. It doesn't matter how many crisis did she prevent, she didn't prevent one and that should not be enough to fire her. Having said that, I assume this was not the first time he expressed his opinions about diversity hiring. The…

One possible way Google could have turned this into a win-win scenario would have been to have the VP of diversity co-opt the memos's authors and put them in charge of some diversity initiatives so that they could experience the nuances of the problems with their viewpoint and perhaps the come to a revised (and usable solution), or if his berries were more closely correct the VP could experience that.

Re: Thought Police

#30

Post by notacoward »

Ah, argument by false analogy. Always a good way to avoid an constructive discussion, as any inconvenient counter-argument can be dropped into the gap between the analogy and its referent at the author's sole discretion. Not going to spend more than a few minutes playing that game.

The problem is that Damore did far more than our elevator operator. He didn't stop at claiming there were innate differences. He assumed that they could justify representational differences a full degree of magnitude greater than those innate differences could possibly account for. He whined about being silenced, in a memo seen by most of the company. He poisoned the well many times, accusing anyone who might (even hypothetically) disagree with him of "generally rejecting science" and "virtue signaling" and being like Communist dictators. He rejected current approaches because their effectiveness isn't absolutely 100% proven, then proposed alternatives that are even less proven (and indeed sometimes proven not to work). It was a veritable parade of (pseudo-)intellectual dishonesty, which the OP continues from its derogatory title to its cowardly coda.

A company that fires people for dishonesty isn't dying. It's smart.

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