James Damore and three others end Google suit

So what are you trying to say, we shouldn't be allowed to talk about gender differences?

There's an enormous difference between the references you made because they are all trying to rationalize treating a race/gender as inferior. On top of that, there is no real scientific evidence backing anything up and it all basically amounts to inferring causation from correlation (ie. they are inferior because they are poor).

James' memo does not in any form attempt to rationalize why women should not become engineers (the analogue to your comparisons), rather it tries to explain why women do not pursue careers in tech at the frequency with which men do.

Women are not "discriminated against" when it comes to signing up for computer science classes in high school or choosing to major in computer science in university, yet significantly less of them sign up for these classes then men. There is no discrimination going on here since any women can sign up for any class of their choosing in high school. Clearly something is causing this gender imbalance, what might that be? That is what the memo tries to investigate. There is nothing "sexist" about asking or attempting to answer this real life phenomenon.

In terms of gender differences, the author lists points such as "women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things" , "women on average are more cooperative", and "Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average", hardly statements that anyone can consider as insinuating female inferiority.

I'm guessing that the most contentious part of the memo is where the author states that women tend to have higher degrees of neuroticism, but he did cite Wikipedia which states "Research in large samples has shown that levels of neuroticism are higher in women than men." and references a research paper [1]. I'm no biology/psychology/gender expert and have no opinion on the authority of the source, but the legitimacy of the paper is certainly not a question of "politics", but of science.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...

Well, this takes the cake as the most toxic comments section I've ever seen on HN.

The degree of "I'm tired of the left being outraged at the right tearing our country apart but i also couldnt care about the right tearing our country apart, oh also let me normalize hating women" makes me very sad for our future.

> 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.

Are you saying that it's wrong for people to judge actions as right or wrong without first offering to forgive the person who did the action?

That's an interesting standard, I've never heard something like that before.

How do you handle the fact that the statement itself does not meet the criterion it's advocating? That is, you're saying it's wrong for people to do X, but you didn't offer forgiveness first. Isn't that what you're saying one shouldn't do?

> We would never tolerate companies that encourage religious discussion but fire employees that say things against the Christian faith.

Surely there exist church-backed business encourage discussion about certain religious topics and would fire you for holding beliefs that don't comport with their particular religion? I'm thinking e.g. church-backed hospitals. Or even churches themselves, although perhaps you wouldn't consider them to be a "business".

But more to the point, I wonder if there are limits to what you've defined as "political". What if my political belief is that Black people are intellectually inferior to white people (and that explains why there are disproportionately fewer Black people in tech). Am I not allowed to have a workplace where some political discussion is allowed (say, a newsroom) and at the same time not tolerate this (or any?) belief?

I don’t really care about Damore or what he thinks.

I’m just saying that if Damore continues to associate with alt-right figures, he shouldn’t be surprised when people start assuming that he’s an alt-right crank, because that’s how people work.

I find someone like Jordan Peterson to have some authoritarian tendencies for sure, but his fans would probably call them "strong opinions". That's fair, abet I doubt that generous interpretation would be extended to someone they disagree with.

Just notice how the IDW feels strongly about free speech, but when it comes to the issue of Palestine and specifically incentivizing disinvestment from Israeli occupied territory in the West Bank, they suddenly have less than nothing to say about it, not to mention the issue of U.S. States passing anti-boycott laws censoring BDS and yet crickets from the IDW.

Being selective in your concern for free speech and only criticizing one side seems hardly "intellectual" to me and I can't take it seriously.

P.S. While the IDW is not exactly defined, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web#Associat... has a decent list.