James Damore and three others end Google suit • Hacker News Board

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#531

Post by CJefferson » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

searchableguy wrote: post #351

zozbot234 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Be precise, how is your community not friendly to women in ways you cannot fix in five minutes? Techbros. Techbros everywhere. It's not what people want to hear, most people would love it if the field and the educational pipeline leading to it had more professional norms all-around. But it's a real thing. (FWIW, I don't think of Damore as part of the problem, indeed his proposals would help a lot if widely adopted.…

I honestly want to meet techbros. I live in some sort of echo chamber where gender is so irrelevant to most participants. I have never seen anyone ask someone's gender on a github issue, I may have missed it but I have seen few issues opened because no inclusivity. No one in any of the programming communities I am in gives two shit about the gender of the participants. Most people have pseudonyms with anime avatars a…

Honestly, they aren't in github issues. They are on Twitter, they are sending people DMs, they are at physical meetups.

Me and my wife are both AI academics in the UK who do a bunch of programming. I have no "interesring stories" to tell, my wife has a dozen including men punching walls because they were beaten by a woman in a board game, being sent death threats and dick pics (not from the same person), and being assumed to be my non-tech wife when we go to events where she was invited and I was going as her partner.

Now, these events aren't daily, or even weekly, but they stick with people and make then feel unwelcome and unsafe.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by wpietri » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #494

wpietri wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't emacs vs vi. Damore's goal was to materially affect who got hired and how they were treated. That's quite a lot of people, and at one of the world's most prominent companies. Nobody can reasonably expect that he should be able to play at that level and have it be consequence-free when it doesn't go his way. Damore is welcome to have crackpot opinions. He's even welcome to express crackpot opinions on his…

Acknowledging that men and women are different, and that reverse discrimination is not an effective solution, is crackpot to you? I would contest that such a denial of reality is what is crackpot. It’s hilarious that you call what he was doing activism.

The go link for his memo was "pc-considered-harmful". PC. You know what that stands for, right? Even he knew he was doing political activism.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by SpicyLemonZest » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:49 PM UTC

spangry wrote: post #528

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired the most vocal guy railing against Damore, so they plausibly could have fired the leaker as well.

That would certainly upset one of my preconceived notions about this whole affair. Could you provide a source on that?

Sure. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/17038430/google-james-dam...

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by mokus » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

ultrawox wrote: post #491

ravenstine wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 permissiv…

I think the modern conservative movement largely is explained by "a group of people that oppose liberalism." That's why you have such a weird coalition of religious groups, older intellectual conservatives, young Republicans, business people, trolls. They really don't have a ton in common, but frankly I get it. I live in the Midwest and while I consider myself an independent, most of my views are moderate or left-win…

This is speculation but it seems like we should inevitably see political factions in the US being defined in this way (and it happens in the Democratic Party too, maybe not in as obvious or extreme a way) as a result of the well-known two-party endgame of our voting system. If your faction isn’t one of the two, your choices are to join one or be irrelevant.

So you jump on the bandwagon with whoever you hate least, and pretty soon you find out that’s almost all you have in common with the rest of the riders.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#535

Post by balls187 » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #390

Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company or the outrage mob, therefore I don't respect what people generally have to say about whether what he did was right or wrong. It's astounding that people are still debating this in this very HN thread. A society of any size that makes virtue claims while simultaneously adding an undue price to being wrong or insensitive deserves to be mocked…

What virtue claims do we make?

I suppose you feel the same way about those two poor white conservative men who were finally arrested for murder after the outrage mob mobilized.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by bergstromm466 » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #390

Damore was not offered a chance to receive forgiveness by either the company or the outrage mob, therefore I don't respect what people generally have to say about whether what he did was right or wrong. It's astounding that people are still debating this in this very HN thread. A society of any size that makes virtue claims while simultaneously adding an undue price to being wrong or insensitive deserves to be mocked…

> Companies shouldn't be encouraging employees to be political

Yet the very act of any type of business dealing is inherently political. To deny that is to misunderstand the word itself. It's a shame that people have weaponized this term (political) and use it as a pejorative. Similar to the term social justice 'warrior', for people showing solidarity.

To not see this truth is to be culturally grandiose, in my opinion. Read Yash Tandon's 'Trade is War' for more.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by UncleMeat » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

JSavageOne wrote: post #408

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.

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.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

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Post by balls187 » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

aguyfromnb wrote: post #530

thosakwe wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. I don't recall him ever "asking for forgiveness," or doing anything besides doubling down on his memo. 2. The "outrage mob" isn't real. You know who got James Damore fired? Himself. It's especially telling that you, and people who defend him, attribute zero fault whatsoever to the person who actually wrote the memo.

> The "outrage mob" isn't real. You have got to be kidding me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming

You mean consequences for your behavior?

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#539

Post by ashtonkem » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

JSavageOne wrote: post #520

ashtonkem wrote: post #478

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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.

> 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.…

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.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#540

Post by wpietri » Sat, May 09, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #526

thosakwe wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Calling it an outrage "mob" is dishonest, and that's why I say it doesn't exist. It's not mob mentality. Did it occur to you that there are reasons that many people could have been outraged by what he wrote? Calling it a "mob" is just you dismissing that. 2. Yes, he got himself fired. Nobody made him write that, and even after writing it, nobody made him post it on a large mailing list where an entire workforce co…

> Calling it an outrage "mob" is dishonest > Again, it's especially telling that you and the people who defend attribute zero fault to the person who actually wrote the memo. I've been honest and I replied in good faith, and yet you just sidestep and lump me in with some made up group of people whom you say attribute "zero fault" to Damore. You didn't listen to me at all. You didn't even ask me what faults I would at…

If you're replying in good faith, you should either defend your "outrage mob" accusation or apologize for it.