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James Damore and three others end Google suit

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651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#651
post #487

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.

Biology has become politicized like climate science did. With each side discarding the inconvenient truths of science whenever it clashes with their tribal narrative. It's an absolute disaster.

That's a fantastic analogy.

Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics.

Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions.

That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces.

> “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 territ…

Do members of the IDW avoid criticizing Israel because they support Israel, or because they think criticizing Israel would make it too easy for their opponents to label them as antisemites? I don't think there is any way of knowing, but I suspect different individuals listed on that page have different reasons and motivations for saying what they say and not saying what they say. I'd bet on Ben Shapiro genuinely supp…

> Do members of the IDW avoid criticizing Israel because they support Israel, or because they think criticizing Israel would make it too easy for their opponents to label them as antisemites?

That I do not know for sure, but isn't their trademark to speak openly regardless of what their opponents would label them as?

It's easy to attack college students. If they're afraid to criticism Israel, they can't claim to stand for free speech regardless of what they opponents think, as they often do.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#653
post #612
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also assume anything you say can/will be purposefully taken out of context and twisted in order to create rage click bait to satisfy someone's ideological crusade, or to generate revenue for a dying industry which is incentivized to cater to the lowest common denominator just to survive.

Literally his whole memo was posted online, in full. I struggle to understand the context that was missing.

The first website to publish his memo (Gizmodo) removed all the graphs and citations, meaning that a great many people who read the memo did not read it in full.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his failure was just naivete. He thought Google wanted legitimate feedback or would support intellectual honesty over popularity. That was wrong.

I mean, the authors of some of the studies Damore cited came out and said that he was misrepresenting them and that they disagreed with the conclusion he drew from them.

I really wish there was a short way to ask for links without sounding confrontational but maybe this preamble will suffice for this message. Do you have any links about these refutations? Thanks.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#655
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He chose to appear on at least one show that routinely promotes white-nationalist talking points – I don't think his politics is really much of a question.

White nationalist as in kkk or white nationalist as in conservative?

White nationalist as in Stefan Molyneux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux#Alt-right,_rac...

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean consequences for your behavior?

You mean like how domestic violence is just consequences for the victim's behavior?

Domestic Violence is about power and control caused of the DV Perpetrator/Aggressor towards the survivor. DV perpetrators use a myriad of tactics to control the relationship with the "victim": financial, physical, emotional, children, and sex.

While the "victim" does bear some responsibility, it's usually with regards to how they are unable (or unwilling) to end a relationship with a DV perpetrator.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is the Damore memo not scientific? It cites academic research, presents evidence, I think the claims it makes are actually the mainstream ones. I realize asking you to debunk the whole memo may be a bit much, so can you just point to the single most consequential unscientific part of it? I read the memo and was horrified by how badly people treated him because of it. To me it seems like a rational and wel…

Citing research is fine. If his memo had been a list of papers with no commentary it would have just been weird and blown over. The problem is when you synthesize ideas from research without expertise. The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document. “It has citations” is not a valid reason to consider something well argued and…

> The problem wasn’t his citations. It was the conclusions he drew from the citations and the policy proposals that he made in his document.

Right, so you personally disagree with his conclusions, thus it must be "problematic".

Unless you're going to elaborate as to what specifically you find problematic, there's not really much to discuss here and this is a pretty useless discussion.

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really isn't debatable. That's the widespread consensus view. Personality traits are judged based on responses to surveys. When you ask large groups of people the same surveys and evaluate them the same way you consistently find women score higher on neuroticism than men. This is a widely repeated finding that is consistent across generations. A paper on neuroticism in older women compared to older men - https…

Genuine question: What actually is neuroticism? I'm broadly familiar with the term in a colloquial sense, but not a scientific sense. Wikipedia says: > Neuroticism is one of the Big Five higher-order personality traits in the study of psychology. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealous…

> Is there truly a common thread between these various emotions that ties them all together as neuroticism, or is neuroticism an arbitrarily chosen set of emotions?

Yes. It's something that shows up in one specific factor analysis as one of five dimensions (i.e. parameters) that effectively summarize your answers to a bunch of questions about personality. Different analyses/models come up with different parameterizations, e.g. the HEXACO model has six parameters, with the Emotionality factor picking up the bulk of "Neuroticism" from the Big 5, but some ending up under Honesty-Humility (reversed) or even under Agreeableness (reversed)!

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what if he's a Mac enthusiast?

Re: James Damore and three others end Google suit

#660

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…

If you have a mediocre employee that's ruining the productivity of less mediocre employees would you keep them around?

All the rest is noise. He simply wasn't worth keeping. Google keeps sexists, racists, and the like in it's executive and senior ranks. The difference is Google thinks they're worth it.

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