James Damore and three others end Google suit

Care to ctrl-f for “weaker” in your citation (which doesn’t even say what you claim) and paste the sentences immediately after?

Here, let me help you:

It should also be a possibility that they're [women] actually stronger performers in tech (I bet you reached for the down arrow before getting to that sentence). Pretending everyone must have equal ability and 50% of executives and 50% of programmers should be women doesn't get us anywhere.

Obviously, [3] doesn’t even come close to approaching what you’re claiming I said.

But you could not have accidentally proven my point any better if you tried, so thanks!

I’ve had enough experience in these arguments to know that this will likely fall on deaf ears, but to restate my point in simpler terms:

The probability that the natural distribution (as in, free from bias or cultural influences) for any profession would be perfectly 50/50 across gender lines is approximately zero.

For those who don’t understand what an average is, this says nothing about the ability of any individual, and says nothing about whether men or women are better or worse for any given role.

> If you honestly can't figure out how using a term of political attack is seen as an attack, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. If you're not a native speaker, I recommend reading up on the history of the term.

I am both a native English speaker and familiar with the term "political correctness", which actually was coined by the left. Suffice to say, there are those across the political spectrum who believe that it is possible to criticize political correctness as a pattern of behavior, without attacking the identity of the people whom political correctness was intended to protect.

> And lastly, what I'm saying is not "guilt by association". To the extent that there are reasonable doubts about his motivation for writing the memo, we have to look to other behavior to see what theory it fits best with. That his first choice was to get cozy with antifeminists is a piece of evidence.

If the only behavioral evidence that you choose to look at is who he associated with, then "guilt by association" describes precisely what you are doing. Did you even watch those interviews? Or any of his other public appearances?

Also, the article you linked to is very telling. It mentions all of these horrible attributes about Molyneux and Peterson, without noting (for instance) that Dr. Peterson is also a subject matter expert in the fields of psychometrics and psychology of personality (his research is highly cited) and who had a business using psychological profiling to aid businesses in hiring decisions. That sounds exactly like the kind of person that ought to have some interesting insights on Damore's memo. Yet his only salient quality to you is that he's "antifeminist"?

> I'm open to new data turning up, but to me the pretty obvious conclusion is that he didn't somehow accidentally write something very similar to a lump of right-wing concern trolling.

Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?

The term "political correctness" has been primarily a right-wing attack for decades: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-political...

If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.

> If the only behavioral evidence that you

I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.

Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd. Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research. He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.

> Honest question, can you point to a right-wing perspective that, in your view, rises above the level of "concern trolling"?

It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse, as demonstrated by their lining up behind a guy who publicly muses about injecting bleach. The kind of conservatism I'm most comfortable with is of the small-business-oriented, Rockefeller-Republican sort, now basically extinct. I frequently appreciate the principled stand of Amash, even though I disagree with the bulk of his actual positions. I regularly see pieces in American Conservative that are sensible and well-reasoned, although I often don't end up agreeing. And I'm a big fan of being conservative in the sense used in engineering or accountancy, but again, being prudent, modest, and careful are anathema to most of the US right these days. And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.

> If one wants to criticize the pattern of behavior without inheriting the modern usage, one has to phrase it differently. Especially in a title. So again, we're back to you believing Damore is apparently incompetent.

That the modern usage has a negative connotation, and even is sometimes invoked as a slur, does not mean it is not used to describe a real phenomenon[1]. To put it simply, political correctness is the censure or censorship of speech not primarily because of it's truth (or lack thereof) but because of the perceived harm such speech does to disadvantaged groups. Whether this leads to the suppression of important truth, and whether that suppression actually benefits the disadvantaged, is very reasonably up for debate.

> I named other things. And could name more. That you're down to willfully missing points makes me think we're just about done here.

I will concede you made other (weak) arguments regarding behavior, but I will amend my point here to say that the fact that you treat those associations as evidence, particularly without providing any connection to the content of the interviews themselves, to be a rather clear example of "guilt by association" whether you intend that or not. Being interviewed by Stefan Molyneux no more makes Damore a white supremacist than being interviewed by Joe Rogan makes him a stoner or being interviewed by Dave Rubin makes him gay. Damore chose his interviews because he was being viciously smeared in the media and these were people who had a large audience and were willing to give him a fair shake. Similar reasons can established for his legal representation.

Also, as a purely tactical matter, to the people who find Damore's memo itself persuasive (or even those who just didn't find it immediately offensive) this kind of argument comes across as being in bad faith. It seems like a way to disqualify Damore without having to engage with his arguments directly.

> Similarly, you trying to paint Peterson as a neutral expert is again absurd.

I never said anything about neutral. He is however, uncontestably an expert in the relevant science. Of course, there are other experts, and they don't all share the same perspective, but if anyone were in a position to correct Damore for being radically off in his representation of the scientific literature Peterson would be a fine choice. The fact that he (among others) thinks Damore does a fine job in representing the literature (for a lay person) means that at the very least the science is not so settled against Damore as many would have you believe.

> Peterson doesn't have a big Youtube following because of his psychological research.

He actually had quite a big audience for his psychology lectures before any of the political stuff happened. You should check out the series on personality, it's really quite interesting.

> He has it because he's a right-wing bloviator. As is Molyneux. The two podcasts have nothing in common other than their alt-right bent, so yes, that's the correct salient characteristic.

Dismissing Peterson's scientific credentials is one kind of wrong. Thinking he is alt-right is quite another. To the extent that he is on the right, he's quite mainstream politically. To understand what the alt-right actually is, I recommend The New Right by Michael Malice[2]. It's very good journalism that is both fair and (at times) highly critical.

> It's hard in the US, as the US right has been undergoing a full intellectual collapse...And there's more, but hopefully that will satisfy.

I appreciate the examples you give in this paragraph. While it was within the parameters of the question I had asked, I was kind of hoping you had specific examples of conservative thought on the issues touched on in Damore's memo. You mention the American Conservative, what do you think of this article from them on the memo[3]?

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-per... (full disclosure, Jordan Peterson was a co-author on the research cited)

[2]https://www.amazon.com/New-Right-Journey-American-Politics/d...

[3]https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/james-damore-...

Quite possibly, if one shows one's work on how one arrived at that statement (statistics can be bloody slippery things, and while individual data points are facts, the analysis, interpretation, and summarization of them starts to wander away from "fact," especially when one begins to do curve fitting or assumptions about population distributions).

And if one runs with that fact alone and tries to build behaviors on it, one's likely to fall into a similar trap to the one the phrenologists fell into: assuming that a single fact is descriptive enough of the world to dictate theory or practice.