Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo

"The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause."

So it's not that "leftists are violent", it's PC that's complacent to violent PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming. A bit different.

Again, I have the impression that parts of this debate could be avoided by accepting some of the caveats and distinctions already made in the memo.

Edit: replaced angry outburst with more civilized one.

>> A lot of people have used that argument in defense of what he wrote, as evidence that the memo was not harmful or hostile to the women he worked with. When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?

So it sounds like we're implying that anybody who presents facts to your coworkers that might enable them to come to stereotypical conclusions has made a hostile work environment? I find it absurd that an environment is hostile because "maybe people are thinking X." I would think hostility would require some form of visible action.

>> I disagree with his use of science and data to convert opinions into facts. It seemed like he cherry-picked research that agreed with his views and didn’t seek dissenting research or opinions before sending the document to internal Google groups.

Isn't the whole point of science is to move the debate away from opinion to fact. His views are certainly much more in line with the facts that what I've heard from his opponents. For example, I don't see anybody disagreeing that women score higher on "neuroticism" measures (wikipedia agrees).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans#Psyc...

>> There’s a difference between “let’s have a discussion” and “let me tell you what’s up, all you wrong people.”

Great, but that has nothing to do with this. The other side certainly would never extend him (or me) that civility. This is a power struggle and I don't know why we're pretending it's not.

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As an aside, this whole debate has made me realize that I was kidding myself if I told myself SJWs were on the side of equality. They are on the side of politically advancing their own in-group-alliance (which doesn't include most minorities, nor the minority most in need - the lower class).

They have no interest in fact because they aren't trying to achieve a clear vision of a better world, rather it's because they are playing politics where facts are just another form of weapon.

The only reason they have so much power in tech (and not say, finance) is because we are altruists/optimists ourselves and tried to see something greater in SJW political games.

Lots people from math and physics have jumped over and become decent, some even great, software engineers. Not many software engineers have successfully switched over to math or physics.

So if gender is not so much an issue for a successful career in, I don't know, algebraic topology (math) or quantum field theory (physics), it surely should be less of an issue in software engineering ...when talking about whatever effects there may or may be at a biological level. So if it's not such a big issue in academia, the problems in software engineering must be more about what kind of workplace culture has grown around in software engineering, not the proposed underlying human biology.

This is a strawman. She said "complicate" not "invalidate".

>Gorillas typically have black fur. So no gorilla can have white fur? Wat?

What actions do you wish to take based on the fur color of gorillas? Damore didn't just reach scientific conclusions about differences in genders. He went further and suggested actions based on these population differences.

To continue your analogy, one could say that Damore's argument comes down to "We only want white furred animals in our zoo, and gorillas typically have black fur, therefore we should ignore gorillas and look for Polar Bears instead". Whereas the other side might be "Given that gorillas typically have black fur, and we think Gorillas are a valuable part of a zoo, we should do extra work to locate the rare white-furred gorillas that do exist".