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James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

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Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also lied about having a PhD (he was in a program, but did not finish). This makes it difficult for me to take him seriously as someone motivated by an insistent search for truth.

He never lied about having a PhD. He was in middle of his PhD program when he decided to drop out and join Google -- nowhere in his his LinkedIn page, did he falsely indicate that he finished his PhD. Da'More must have completed at least course work and research required for master's, however, and Harvard gave him master's instead.

Until he was asked about it, Damore's LinkedIn "Education" section said "Harvard University / PhD, Systems Biology / 2011-2013".

After, he changed it to "Harvard University / Master of Science - MS, Systems Biology / 2011-2013".

The fact that his old profile said PhD, in place of the MS degree he actually had, does look to me like falsely indicating that he had a PhD.

http://www.businessinsider.com/james-damore-removes-phd-stud...

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#672
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like Trump seems stuck in some kind of info-loop with Fox News, Damore seemed to get most of his memo ideas from those youtubers in the first place. He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake! In an internal corporate communication about how to better deal with diversity. The mind boggles.

marxists.... peterson?

Your comment is too brief to parse properly but yes Peterson talks about "Cultural Marxism" on his YouTube channel and so does Damore in the famous memo.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#673
"difference in preferences and abilities" has been characterized by TechCrunch.com as "biologically less capable of engineering." This is not simply an inaccurate representation of Damore's memo, it is a complete smear job. The SJWs can't tolerate anyone, especially a white male, speaking out against their bullshit. I hope Damore wins, and wins big.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can definitely be the case. There are lots of sh--ty white male programmers working in the industry. I have met plenty of white men who have masters level CS education, have worked for Google and other top name companies, and can't produce a line of useful working code to save their lives. The reasons why corporations frequently hire people who don't actually produce anything are varied and complex, but it happe…

And I'd add that there's evidence (and plenty of anecdote) that the men who most object to diversity are not so good at what they do. Which makes sense; they are the ones who have the most to lose from an increased talent pool. [1] Personally, I'd be very interested to see Damore's code. We already know that he lied about both a PhD and being a chess master. [2] I would not be shocked at all to find out that he's not…

From the complaint:

"23. Damore was diligent and loyal, and received substantial praise for the quality of his work. Damore received the highest possible rating twice, including in his most recent performance review, and consistently received high performance ratings, placing him in the top few percentile of Google employees. Throughout the course of his employment with Google, Damore received approximately eight performance bonuses, the most recent of which was approximately 20% of his annual salary. Damore also received stock bonuses from the Google amounting to approximately $150,000 per year.

24. Damore was never disciplined or suspended during his entire tenure at Google.

25. Based on Damore’s excellent work, Damore was promoted to Senior Software Engineer in or around January 2017—just eight months before his unlawful termination by Google."

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#675
post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the Big Five has been debunked as being too lexical for biological differentiation. Basically its lexical nature introduces perceptual bias that skews any factor analysis for biological structures - i.e. behavior between genders, for example. The way Damore uses it to support his hypothesis wasn't correct. >And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using l…

1. Whether or not the Big Five are appropriate for the analysis or not, or whether they're ultimate truth or not, doesn't really matter for the point I and GP were making: Damon's terminology is jargon from differential psychology and easily misunderstood. ("Women score higher on neuroticism on average" does not mean "Women are too neurotic to work as engineers in big companies", or whatever.) 2. I think it takes mor…

1. And my point is that even with it's correctly understood, it is still incorrect. I agree that the entire document was overly vague and open to interpreters inserting their own ideas, usually tied to their own political identity.

2. Appealing to number of citations is an appeal to popularity (fallacy) because it avoids criticizing the content. It's also not "unseating" the big five, just demonstrating how the big five is incorrectly used as biological factor analysis. There are other applications is psychoanalysis the big five can be use for.

3. If you read the paper, you'd see that Table 3 is used in conjunction with other data to prove their hypothesis on projection-through-capacity bias.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#676
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people "on the left" won't allow him to speak, where exactly do you expect him to go? It's like the people on the right saying Edward Snowden is obviously a traitor/spy because he went to Russia. Uhhh... something very obvious is being ignored there. Also, come on ... Joe Rogan is definitely not right-wing. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin do not self-identify as right-wing. And your [1] just seems a little extreme.…

This has nothing to do with being right or left. It is simply a human decency thing. A manager and company is responsible for everyone and after he shared such views with his name you could never keep him and have him working along side women. Google did exactly what they had to do. It is not complicated.

This is the heckler's veto. Free speech is a cultural matter, not just a protection from the federal and state governments.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. If the memo wasn't enough, him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1] Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn…

Just like Trump seems stuck in some kind of info-loop with Fox News, Damore seemed to get most of his memo ideas from those youtubers in the first place. He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake! In an internal corporate communication about how to better deal with diversity. The mind boggles.

> He's got a footnote in it about how complaints about gay rights are just an attempt by Marxists to undermine capitalism for goodness sake!

This is, of course, a standard right-wing talking point about modern gender/race/etc. equality movements.

It's about as accurate as calling neoconservatism a Communist conspiracy because some notable early figures were anti-Stalinist ex-Trotskyites.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neurology and psychology studies have shown differences in the way men and women think. For example, when navigating, men tend to use dead reckoning, while women tend to prefer landmarks. Similar differences may exist with respect to the modes of thinking useful for engineering. With that in mind, consider that our current modal computer architecture and programming paradigms were designed and implemented by men. The…

That’s an interesting idea, but it sounds like your argument rests on two assertions: 1) Professions tend to become more gender biased over time 2) It was equally likely that computing become a female dominated field. These are novel claims that require justification. If (1) was true, we should expect to see it in other fields. But many industries seem quite stubbornly gender neutral - for example medicine. (Although…

I don't agree. The gender bias of a profession this year is dependent on the gender bias from previous years. They would only become more biased over time if the previous bias favored hiring new entrants to the field that are more biased.

If there is an imbalance in intrinsic inchoate biases, such as if men tended to unconsciously hire 55% men and 45% women, whereas women preferred to hire 50% each, then an initial 50-50 split, but with no other biases in play after someone enters the field, would drift towards an equilibrium at around .5263 men and .4737 women. More men magnify the male bias towards males.

My other assumption was that early movers have a magnified effect on the future of the field. Think about how any arbitrary decisions made by Turing or von Neumann could still be affecting computing today, like the sign convention for the charge on an electron--that could have been +1 instead of -1, and many of the signs in physics equations would be flipped. If a female had been making those decisions, we might be using a different computing paradigm that would better match female thought patterns. Computing as we now know it initially came about through the confluence of war and academia. Mathematicians designed machines to aim artillery pieces and automate military-grade ciphers, and then to automatically break automated ciphers. The development of computing has occurred rapidly and recently, and after air travel and telephony, such that there really is only one global culture for it. The body of work is already so large, and readily available to everyone, that starting from a different foundation today really does require the fictional time stasis bubble that I described.

You would have to look back into history, when culture barriers were stronger, to look for examples of computing devices that may have been used preferentially by men or women.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#679

He doesn't have a choice really. With the PR mess he got himself into, no big company will ever hire him. Imagine the possible headlines "Microsoft hires the James Damore, the male supremacy advocate fired from Google". Nope, regardless the technical skill or his actual personality, his public image is forever ruined. So he realistically has a choice between becoming a paid speaker for fringe ultra-right organization…

This is true. If the memo wasn't enough, him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like Stefan Molyneux, Jordan Peterson, Mike cernovich, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, etc. is suspicious. [1] Generally I wouldn't have minded if he went to right wing outlets, as long as he had also gone to left wing outlets. I was willing to listen to his reasoning. But it became clear after the memo came out that he didn…

He mentioned in one of his interviews that very few left wing outlets would even invite him to interviews.

Of the ones that did, it was heavily edited to present a certain bad narrative of him.

Re: James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google

#680
post #505

Honestly, this whole thing is just ugly. I read what he wrote. It was (mostly) ugly but contained a lot of truth. Before you downvote/call me a Nazi, I'm a mixed race woman in tech. I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. I also see people hired who are minorities but also great at their job. It's not a binary pattern. But those who are hired just because they are a POC or female, yet are…

> I definitely see people hired just because of their minority status. How do you know that they were hired just because of their minority status?

Because there are explicit examples of this with supporting evidence given in the lawsuit.
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