Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

I suspect that's part of it for sure. A lot of what conservatives have been getting upset about over the last few decades is diffusion of power away from well-off, white, straight men to everybody else. Loss of power still feels like a personal loss, even if systemically it's a move toward a more equal structure.

There is some discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554

You won't actually find an argument from me that Damore didn't behave stupidly, assuming he wanted to keep his job. However, whatever debunkings might there be to Damore's memo, neither Google, nor rags like Verge, nor even Economist provided any. Economist went as low as referencing Zunger's "pathetic bleatings" that make Damore's memo look like a Nobel material. And "social science"s wounds are mostly self-inflicted -- those few arguments that were presented against The Memo came mostly from departments of "womyn's studies" where results are determined long before research starts. Just look at what happens to Peterson (his scientific bona fides seem to be beyond reproach) when he tries to speak.

Google's internal discussion groups are quite weird, but apparently inciting street violence is perfectly fine. I think it would have been reasonable for Damore to expect that a memo that at least pretends to be objective, and does not call for any illegal activity would be acceptable as well.

Shold Google have a right to fire anyone over anything? I believe so. But if they fire Damore for reasons they give, which really are complete bunk, and do not fire the "I'll punch you in the face" crowd, they are hypocrites, and might get mauled themselves in the end.

That's a really good question. When I start to think about it two things crop up:

1. How is discrimination defined? Is it an excess of reports of discriminatory behavior e.g. sexual harassment, or is it a discrepancy between the general distribution of some class and the observed distribution?

If it's the latter, you're already implicitly arguing that society should have an equal distribution of outcomes.

If it's the former, sign me up for what whatever awareness campaign is going to help address the issue socially & politically. I'd truly be happy to participate in raising awareness and working to create an inclusive and safe environment for everyone (and I have supported such in the past, regardless of whether I personally think there may be an issue or not, out of solidarity). I'm willing to be proven wrong here: I just haven't seen anything that indicates SV actually has, following with the example, a sexual harassment problem relative to the rest of the world. If we demonstrated that SV observes more sexual harassment than average, I'd wonder WTF was up too and even agree with trying to _target SV_ in order to solve the problem. Where the logic breaks down for me is when we target SV and paint it as a place with rampant sexual harassment in a campaign to address a general social issue.

Speaking for socially-liberal-economically-conservative individuals for a second: we don't disagree with the ideals, it's usually that we disagree with the tactics. A minor example, say we agree ingrained and harmful social norms regarding expectations of females' role in society is causing women to be underpaid in the workforce today. Instead of demanding the regulation of salaries at a political level (a very economically liberal idea that I think plenty of people are not onboard with) we'd argue for an approach involving educating and empowering women so that they don't end up, at large, agreeing to work for numbers that are below average/market rates (I'm not blaming women, but I'm suggesting that they share some of the responsibility in correcting the imbalance because at the end of the day it is their problem).

I'm saying all this because I feel much of the issue is exactly that these nuanced topics are easily conflated, "You don't support regulating equal salaries for all? You're a sexist bigot!". Just no. It's so frustrating to hear that and it really hinders progress towards agreeable solutions for investing resources in solving issues.

2. Strategies for addressing industry-level discrimination that don't involve looking at the outputs? A few come to mind. I am a huge supporter of listening to the under-represented groups and making sure their feedback is present when developing responsible, inclusionary methods for hiring and operation. Also education. If our "American dream biased" (otherwise, capitalist) mode of operation has lead to a systemically ingrained and observed e.g. education gap, then we should invest resources in educating under represented groups specifically in creating programs that serve to bolster the industry in question.

The only thing to keep in mind is how we come to the conclusion that one industry exhibits an abnormal skew. We'll probably disagree a bit here, but I think it's okay for an industry to exhibit a general (not abnormal) "post game" skew. Whether it's females in nursing or men in engineering, I am willing to entertain the idea that it might be related to the nature of the game and less about the playing field and rules. One of the biggest arguments against the wage gap is that if a company could pay 70 cents on the dollar for female employees, men would be out a job pretty quick. That is of course assuming an unlimited supply of qualified female candidates. Regardless, either a) the industry is wildly sexist and prefers men (sexist enough that they're willing to pay 30% more on the budget sheet), or b) something else is contributing to the gap. It could be as simple as a difference in interests between genders. Especially conceding those differences could be the result of socially poisonous expectations cast upon children, I think the answer is again to focus on the pipeline.

I guess my overall point is that it's hard to come to an objective definition of discrimination. I have also realized that if you define it by the outcomes, it becomes a much bigger problem because you have to effectively control for everything in society to realize a world where we've achieved 100% utopian uniformity (importantly, it's no longer diversity). I find it more effective and productive and intellectually honest to focus the lens on making sure children are given a safe environment and equal opportunity to to explore whatever keeps their heart content. Would you not also agree it would be a problem to impose some idealistic notion of a perfect 50/50 split in gender across all industries upon children for fear of coercing them to do something they're not actually interested in due to pressure to achieve some broader fabricated social utopia? Don't take that the wrong way, I still think we need to target our efforts at building a fair platform, but it's the flip-side of the regulated outcomes argument: if you're not careful you end up discriminating all the same, just at the other end of the pipe. Let's just keep the pipes clean... social neutrality!

Yeah, I think direct description of the actual events is the way to go. Especially when so often the actual event is something like, "felt uncomfortable after receiving public criticism".

We're going to do that analysis again sometime soon. If you email hn@ycombinator.com in a week or two we could probably give you the info. I might write a post about it as well.