[1] I'm really not sure, I'm not kidding that I'm interested in how this plays out.

Many of the media interpretations of what James Damore wrote were very biased, and effectively amounted to hit pieces. His use of terms like "Trait Neuroticism" were direct uses of psychological terms which just sound bad as everyday English. Evolutionary Biology also tends to have a "dismal" feeling to it, like Economics can.

One can't take fields like Evolutionary Biology and Economics as morally prescriptive. In that direction lies madness, clearly. However, to then take a knee-jerk ideological stance towards science and declare that everyone must be equal inside is just the West's version of Lysenkoism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

As is usually the case, reality is complex, requires a nuanced understanding, and might sound depressing if you give it a pessimistic read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

Obviously my statement is not evidence either. I only wanted to point it out because this is so often overlooked when it comes to these issues. This is an arena where our cognitive biases are especially pernicious, and any discussion needs to address them.

Also nobody ever seems to ask: diversity of what exactly? What's the target? Life experience? There is no qualitative score for that, nor is any single person's life more or less interesting and influential than anyone else.

The only thing we can objectively and accurately measure is merit, motivation, and results, and we should use those metrics alone for hiring and advancement, in addition to fighting subjective bias (like removing names and photos from resumes) and making sure there's equivalent opportunity for anyone to try. After that, it would be best if just let people do what they want to do and move on.

But why does that make it okay? I absolutely believe that you're right in that there has been worse discrimination over the decades and that maybe old white men can find jobs elsewhere, but that doesn't make discrimination okay. It's not okay when those "old school companies" discriminate against any minorities and it's not okay when some discriminate against old white men.

More recent studies don't show any bias against women in callback rates. In fact, some show slight bias for women (and if you're willing to look at non peer reviewed sources, more than a slight: https://talent.works/blog/2018/01/08/the-science-of-the-job-...)

Then there must be a biological difference between women from different cultures that's also contributing, because I've only observed this "lack of interest" in Anglosphere women.

From my experience, for instance, Indian women have no such problem and are in fact strongly represented within the IT profession and I've worked alongside several of them. Women in my country of birth (Greece) have no such problem and about two fifths of the Greek programmers I know are women. In the British universities I studied and the British workplaces I worked in the last few years, on the other hand, women are about a tenth of all programmers I've met.

So because it's a bit absurd for Anglo women to be so specifically genetically programmed to stay out of the IT professions, I'm going to assume it's not a genetic, but a cultural thing going on.

Btw, I've discussed this with a female Indian software engineer I was working with and she explained that in India, working in IT is seen as an office job and so more suited to women. Traditional gender roles, innit.

It’s very obvious to me that the negative reaction was greatly amplified by the ever-outraged and ever-posturing social (media) justice contingent.

(it's secondary, but FWIW, I'd debate that the Damore memo contained a lot of truth: yes it contained some truth, but it contained more/deeper falsehoods and wrong conclusions, IMO. So it's a bit unproductive to focus on the "truth" part. OTOH it's horrifically unproductive and wrong to fire someone for expressing a misguided, but not inherently evil/malicious p.o.v.)

I don't think anyone believes in the opposite, that biological difference in gender plays exactly zero part in lack of interest in tech from women. The memo was suggesting this could play a part, but not whether if biological differences are significant or even meaningful.

To the best of my knowledge, we can't disentangle biological from cultural biases across gender. Hunting down biological reasons isn't productive and threatens gender equality initiatives, hence the massive backlash.

Should we question the ideals of gender equality in the workplace? That's probably the discussion the memo wanted to inspire, but it only led to out cries of "sheeple better wake up" and "hell no."

Its not that way for white guys to receive hundreds of Nos?

How do you know that they were hired just because of their minority status?

That maybe one of the saddest statements in the history of modern discourse. It’s not your fault for saying it, it’s that you needed to say it.

We have reached the point where identity matters more than content. This is the exact opposite of the MLK dream as I understood it.

No offence but I think it's kind of harmful to everyone when you make arguments based on your race and gender.

Why would it matter that you are "a mixed race woman in tech"? Your comment should be judged only by its content, not by its author's race or gender, right?

Of course. They'd get fired.

Could you elaborate a little more about its "ugliness"?

That's just it; it really did not. It contained a lot of things that people who aren't members of those groups he targeted think are plausible.

"I do think that men and women are biologically different and, it likely does contribute to a lack of interest in tech from women. "

And what, specifically, would those differences be?

How else would several subthreads of subthreads report 40+ replies in an hour once the whole thing is collapsed? There be demons.

Replace "white men" with "black woman" and they'd have a field day clutching pearls and fanning themselves silly.

Damore may be an insensitive autist... Or maybe he's one of the few sensitive to see through all the posturing.

I wouldn't be surprised if an employer chose to leave claims to which those rules apply out of the coverage of any arbitration agreement; leaving the employee on the hook for court costs is probably a better discouragement to claims, especially meritless ones, than arbitration is.

[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=160495945137091...

Yes they are. Or at least whites and males are a protected class (at the suit alledges discrimination against these classes independently, not just their intersection).

It is true that the intent of the anti discrimination laws was to protect non-whites and females, codifying that into law would be a clear violation of the equal protections clause and make any such law unconstitutional.

>My personal unqualified opinion is that they will settle out of court for wrongful termination.

The wrongful termination argument defiantly seems stronger here. However, it is worth keeping in mind that they have not settled yet. I assume Damore's laywers would have tried settling before even filing [0]. If Google wanted to settle they should have done it back than, before the PR hit of the suit being filed happened. Coming up is the PR hit of discovery, which is going to bring to light a lot of skeletons that Google would rather keep hidden. (Even if Google did nothing wrong with regards to this case; no organization the size of Google can go through discovery without something coming out)

[0] Assuming their actual goal is just money. They claim to be doing this to effect change. While their public statements on motivation are highly suspect, it is within the realm of reason that they are actually interested in this case for the political agenda, in which case they would want to take it to court.

Just like you aren't asked to strip search when going through TSA, `just because`. There needs to be a legitimate reason and suspicion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

PS. Being told that "You are only here because you're a diversity hire, you can't actually do the work," is creating a hostile working environment.

Damore was fired because he was bad for business. Not because he's white, male, conservative, or the contents of his memo. Had the memo not been leaked publicly, I have no doubt he'd still be working at Google and his memo ignored and/or forgotten. He simply became too much of lightning rod for Google to continue to employ him.

Google will settle for the same reason. It is better for business to pay him off and make sure he never talks about it again, than to drag this out.

The only people who will be financially better off in this whole deal will be the lawyers, and nothing will be resolved in reference to the larger issues surrounding this case.

Europe has its holy cows as well. Try publicly questioning the Syrian refugee program or come up with scientific evidence that nationals coming from war conflict zones have a higher chance of becoming criminals - you'll get crucified the same way.

Sometimes old cultural artifacts go away in the "mother country" but persist in "the colonies." Seems like the witch-hunting mentality is something that's stuck around in the US, infecting both the political Right and Left.

Or maybe you mean to say that in Europe all men are so sensible that nobody cracks dongle jokes in presence of female coworkers?

Or maybe that majority of the European women would not complain to the HR if someone did crack that joke because they are not stuck up?

Because lemme just make it clear, they didn't get fired for the dongle jokes, they got fired for the shitstorm which arose because of their jokes and how people on twitter were rallying to fire those guys.

Also, the woman who caused the shitstorm was also fired from her company due to the counter shitstorm which ensued.

Maybe you mean to say that in Europe, a company wouldn't fire someone if a shitstorm is created due to an employee's juvenile actions, because I am pretty sure that it is incorrect too.

Since they were G+ blocklists, they were obviously on company computers. OTOH, it's not clear (despite the lawsuits characterization, which is pretty directly contradicted by the posts and emails offered to support it) that these were motivated by ideology rather than disruptive manner of expressing that in the workplace. Moreover, it's not clear they they were, in fact, used for any problematic purpose.

> Discovery could go wrong for Google in a million ways

Which is why there won't be a settlement; it's clearly a politically motivated suit aimed to hurt Google as badly as possible; if Damore and the other individually named plaintiff were seeking to maximize the probability and magnitude of personal recompense, this would be a direct action. A settlement with no admission of guilt, no discovery, and just a go-away cash payment that’ll mostly be assigned to the attorneys won't achieve the goals for which they are filing the suit.

[1] https://www.politicalcompass.org/

This is probably a discussion where painting with a broad brush muddies the waters. Specifically because we're talking about distinctions between individuals within the group you're calling "conservatives".

Also, I get the impression that you're conflating conservatives and populists on this issue. Is that intentional? Because populism and conservatism seem pretty orthogonal to me.

or do you mean google settles? maybe. I kind of wish they would just let their lawyers run wild with this though.

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. "The far right is just a slip away from the reasonable right, therefore the reasonable right is dangerous?" But you don't apply that same idea to the left? Why not?

The real pattern here is that he went to the shows that would have him as a guest for reasonable discussion.

I also listened to the James Damore episode, and while I thought James did a good job of making his point and Joe did an AWESOME job of interviewing him while not taking sides, it felt like James was pretty disingenuous and lacked a general understanding of how to behave in a workplace as well as how to treat other people.

Have you watched any of his right wing outlet interviews? Literally on every interview he mentions "Nobody from left reached out to me, only the right wing outlets reached out to me". I'd definitely recommend watching his Dave Rubin interview (even though you think he is a right winger).

If you were him, you'd rather go out and present your side, than to be portrayed in whichever smear light the media wants to portray you.

There are people who lost the narrative from both left and right (like Milo) and that is definitely worse than losing the support for only one side.

Also, hypothetically it sounds great that you show up to both sides on a divided issue like this, but that isn't possible anymore in the polarized society we live in (a great example of this is you classifying Dave Rubin as 'right wing', just see how many people are calling you out on it).

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

I read the memo. If one is familiar with the research and evolutionary biology, there is nothing in there to react that strongly against, unless one takes a biased, insincere reading of what he actually wrote.

him immediately going to right wing YouTubers like

Those were the only people who would talk to him without trying to make it a hit piece, same as Bret Weinstein.

Stefan Molyneux,

Not sure what Mr. Molyneux is, but given his Libertarian bent, he really doesn't fall in with the mainstream North American right. I'm really skeezed out by his past calls to his audience for "de-fooing" which reads like a cult leader asking his followers to isolate themselves from society and listen only to him.

Jordan Peterson

Terms himself a classical liberal, but also terms himself a conservative, which isn't contradictory. He's been kinda "adopted" by a northern Native American tribe. People who try to paint him as "Alt-Right" aren't actually listening to what he's saying, and are effectively in an evidence-free cloudcuckooland. (He isn't anti-trans. Rather, he's against some nefarious anti-science and compelled speech tactics employed by activists who claim to speak for all trans people. He has received numerous letters from trans people in support of his message.) I have yet to see genuine criticism of him which stands up to scrutiny.

Mike cernovich

Don't like this guy, or his politics. Why do you lump this guy and Molyneux in with people like Jordan Peterson? Doesn't make any sense to me, except as a poison pill.

Joe Rogan

Would have passed perfectly fine as a liberal in the 90's. I think the far left doesn't like him simply because he won't play along with their politics. I find him refreshingly honest and highly intelligent. (Yes, he was a moon hoaxer at one point, but unlike a lot of stupid people, he had the wherewithal to listen to arguments and change his mind.)

Dave Rubin

Terms himself a liberal, also a "classical liberal." He's made a turn towards Libertarianism. He strikes me as sincere in wanting to give everyone a chance to be heard. I think he has intellectual integrity, and as such, he's willing to change his mind. His sincerity and intellectual integrity are the best things he has going for him, though I judge him to be just at a layperson's level intellectually.

Steven Crowder

I don't think Mr. Crowder is as funny or as smart as he thinks. I think he falls down a bit in terms of his intellectual honesty and in his scholarship. (Or course, he uses the "comedian" card to get out of that.) I think his effort to expose Antifa was creditable, but I wish he did a better job of having substance. All of these topical comedians are 10X funnier when they have substance. Colbert used to be funny, and it's because he had that.

etc. is suspicious. [1]

Given that you grouped all these people together, I find your list very suspicious.

Let's say you're a shy/introverted engineer working at Google. You are going to a bunch of diversity events because it's an easy way to progress in your career. You find things you disagree with, or think are potentially illegal, but overall agree with the end goal: more women / PoC at Google, and so put forward an analysis that supports the same goal, even asserting that diversity is a good thing, but indicating that Google's methodology is problematic, and possibly illegal. You shop it around, including to HR, who rejects it, get lots of constructive criticism and feedback from peers, revise it, and continue hoping you eventually do cause a good change in your organization.

Someone then sees it, gets angry, and proceeds to leak it to the press. A few days later, nearly every mainstream news organization has an article calling you a woman-hating sexist, calling your memo a "screed" and treating you like some kind of Nazi. Peers you've never spoken to start sending you threatening and hateful messages, not having even read your work, instead relying on clearly defamatory claims made by "news" organizations, totally misquoting what you've said, and even putting words in your mouth. Then you're fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes" when you've explicitly drawn a line in your work between societal expectations on gender expression and biological predisposition due to sex, that is, you're fired for something you didn't actually say or do, and it's final, there's no appeal.

You're this young guy here, with such negative publicity, and stuck in a part of the country that's 90% leftist or left-leaning, being called all sorts of horrible things by thousands of people you don't even know. You check Twitter and see your name is associated with some of the most hateful words you could imagine.

Now, in this situation, do you respond to CNN who has just printed their 17th hitpiece on you, and hope they'll be fair to you, because you're not assertive enough to deal with the confrontation required if they start putting words in your mouth or asking leading questions? Or do you seek to tell your side of the story from people who are already presenting the story in a more neutral way?

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.

This is the danger of progressive supremacy and the only way out of this hell-hole is encouraging true diversity and inclusiveness -- diversity of thought that includes right-wing conservative viewpoints in addition to those of the left.

Some of these aren't like the others.

And to make sure that people know: He's a liar. Even if you ignore him intentionally misrepresenting his PhD status, he boldly lied about his FIDE chess master status.

Is this just an attempt to extend his relevance a bit longer?

That was just a joke, stop pretending he is a neo-nazi.

I've never made a fuckup of nearly the same magnitude, but the times I made a mistake in public apologizing always made things worse.

There are more tech jobs than those at Google, Facebook, etc.

If anything Google will settle because the proof of misrepresentation is in James's favor.

Sure there are lots of things you could and Google could have argued. But they chose to respond to what had to be either a different paper or their emotions.

Initial filing for a court case is crucial for establishing what we're actually sueing over, and this will be an interesting one, because the chances of his legal team winning this one are definitely non-zero.

Don't be so sure of that. Federal law prohibits firing an employee who is trying to improve working conditions. And that's what he is claiming he was doing with his memo.

And there are a number female SJW Google employees who have made really vicious, public, anti-male statements and no one batted an eyelash. So I think his claim of gender-based discrimination is quite supportable.

People barely have any idea about how to hire a software engineer, much less judge someone's true "ability".

Preferences are also very complicated. People may prefer things very differently given the environment. That quote, along with many others, demonstrates the absolute lack of genuineness on the part of Damore.

Damore throws away any pretense of being objective/scientific when he makes claims like this based on metrics that are hardly measurable. A decent scientist would recognize that making claims with very serious implications like this is greatly irresponsible.

As for the distibution of preferences based on sex. While some might claim that sex does not affect preferences. A Meta-study found robust sex differences in children’s toy Indicating that sex "might" be a factor in deciding factor. The categorical refusal of this claim to the point the mere fact of suggesting that it "might" be true let alone asserting it is taboo, is scientifically unfounded.

source: Study finds robust sex differences in children’s toy preferences across a range of ages and countries http://www.psypost.org/2017/12/study-finds-robust-sex-differ...

I think many women have preferences that steer them away from engineering, this may be societal or genetic in nature but that's something that is being debated at this point.

I think saying his use of the word abilities is what gets him in a lot of trouble here.

So no, I would say the original quote is not a good summary of the quote you quoted.

"Misunderstanding statistical distribution" https://medium.com/@martinweigert/misunderstanding-probabili...

This is different from discriminatory hiring of women to be forced into a male oriented role. This is a substantive claim, which he accuses Google of doing. Discriminatory hiring is illegal, and also stupid, from a free market standpoint.

Tldr: If women aren't buying your product (not applying to Google), it's not the fault of women, its your product that needs to change to suit their wants and needs.

This is only sexist if you think men and women don't, as a general statistical rule, tend toward different interests along a bimodal distribution. But they do.

"James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board that was perceived by many to argue that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering"

They can also point out that he denied he argued this, and that there is plenty of disagreement over whether his memo said it or not.

I know plenty of folks are saying they read it and don't see how one can interpret it any other way. But the fact that you get so many comments indicating they did not interpret it that way is a strong indicator of a lack of consensus. The way the article is written implies a certainty, and does not reflect the reality around the memo.

Essentially, to insist that this is what Damore meant, based only on his memo, is insisting that a huge number of HN posters are playing the same game Damore is. It's much easier to believe that there are other valid interpretations of the memo and to allow for the possibility that Damore had one of the other interpretations.

He was fired for a reason.

I'm having some difficulty understanding your statement. Would you mind clarifying a few things?

- Do you mean all Americans, or just some?

- When you say "do not understand", what do you mean by that?

- I'm unclear as to why you specifically mentioned Americans. Are you comparing them to some other group(s)? And if so, which one(s)?

After having read two lengthy pieces about him and his case, I think you are showing a lack of empathy and willingness to put yourself into some other person's shoes. You might disagree with his actions and world view. But you should maybe not be so quick with your labeling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/16/james-dam... http://quillette.com/2018/01/05/empathy-gap-tech-interview-s...

That isn't my interpretation at all. His entire point was that Google's current strategy was ignoring the cultural and sociological factors that might be discouraging women from entering the field. Rather than simply giving women preferential treatment during the hiring process, and going out of the way to specifically hire women, he argued that we should be spending more time identifying why women aren't naturally drawn to the field (or why more women later choose to leave the field). Fix that problem first, or the women that get hired will eventually leave, because we haven't done enough to consider why they don't feel welcome.

He never said that women are unfit to be engineers. He argued (clumsily, I admit) that we've created an environment that favors the preferences and strengths of men over those of women. If we want to see more women thrive in tech, start by changing the culture.

I think that most of the outrage over Damore's memo can be chalked up to poor communication on his part. He lays out evidence, but he never explicitly states his argument. It's like he assumed there was a single, obvious conclusion that readers would arrive at. Some of us got the message, but apparently a whole lot more didn't. The outcome is almost perfect in its irony: he cites a greater emphasis on empathy as a way of making the engineering field more hospitable to women, but he fails miserably at using empathy to evaluate how people will interpret his own words.

The latter is an obvious statement however people seems keen to deliberately misinterpret it to fuel their rightous outrage.

I’ll use high jump as an example. Suppose I only hire high jumpers who can leap over X meters. I find that I naturally hire less women because women on average can’t jump as high as men. The women who can are obviously as qualified as men. Now I make the statement that due to biological differences this may explain the hiring disparity, rather than discrimination.

No, he's saying that they also might be less interested, for biological reasons. I recommend actually reading the memo (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...): "Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men."

Whether sex differences explain the gender disparity in tech isn't even the kind of question that cog dev folks ask.

And a very strong case can be made that women make different life choices which result in generally different outcomes in those areas.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

ugh.

[citation needed]

When the majority of people are too afraid to come to someone's defense (publicly) because they're afraid that the internet pitchfork mobs will come and destroy their lives too, a large part of society is doing something wrong.

And that large part of society that attempts to do the silencing/shaming/smearing/destroying of the opposition might think they're scoring a victory for their cause (whether or not that cause is worthy is beside the point), but that's not necessarily true, and we saw proof of that in the last US election.

As a manager you have to think about everyone in the team.

He spoke to the distribution of preferences and abilities. Turning this into an absolutist simplification should offend anyone with a brain.

The science seems to state that nature rolls the dice more with males than with females. We know, for instance, that there are far more very low IQ males than females, and this is understood as fact. This doesn't mean that you or I are therefore low IQ, despite the distribution increase. And the stats seem to say that nature also varies on the side of high IQ more with males.

That says nothing to whether a given male or female are either low or high, and only applies at scale. Scale that is meaningless when assessing a given candidate, but is certainly pertinent when talking about representation across an entire industry or large organization.

> the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes

From the article:

> women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering

Do you not see the difference?

As I recall, his entire point is that we should be reshaping the field to make it more appealing to women so that they are drawn to it naturally, as opposed to the current strategy of giving women preferential treatment in the hiring process, only to have them leave because we haven't addressed the underlying problems that are driving them away.

That's hardly a radical idea. There are benefits to his approach: I, for one, think the field would benefit greatly if we focused more on, for example, the importance of empathy. Thinking about others ought to be a fundamental pillar of software engineering, as it naturally leads to better UX, APIs, and services. And when we think about the people who will be maintaining our code, we're inclined to write better code that is easier to grok.

You even highlight the word _exactly_ but that is not what he said. That quote says they don't have equal representation and there maybe biological differences to blame.

The main reason for confusion seems to be the quote assumes women might not be as attracted by tech work as men are. That assumption changes the meaning because in your interpretation "Women want to be in tech as much as men and D'Amore is saying they just don't have the genes for it" vs "Women want to be in tech less than men to start with and besides bigotry, hate and marginalization, cultural biases, there could be a biological explanation for it".

I know we all think tech is awesome, we are getting paid to do what we love, etc. But it turns out many people, and maybe women more than men, don't find sitting in a cubicle all day inverting binary trees appealing. I don't think biology is the main driver here [+] but D'Amore does. He might be wrong, but I don't see why it had to become this controversial topic and lead to firing and lawsuits. They could have just said "here is why science doesn't support your view, thanks for starting the discussion, but you're wrong" and leave it at that.

[+] I don't support his view, I'd personally blame culture for women not even wanting to be in tech. Having lived in Eastern Europe where there is less "stigma" against girls liking math and computer science. It's not a cause, or a talking point at least, it's just a profession like accountant or doctor.

B = biological causes

... A differs in part due to B ...

... reason why we don't see equal rep in tech/leadership.

Then he goes on to say maybe if we take A into consideration when designing tech and leadership roles, can we solve this dilemma.

He does not mention performance, just preference.

Perhaps because what he actually said was that statistically women tend to have lower expression of the traits that engineering positions favor and lower interest in those positions. And because of this the representation of women in tech is lower than their representation in the general population.

Nowhere did he say "all women are worse than all men at engineering jobs". In fact he repeatedly explained that there are tons of exceptions to the statistical rule.

[1] And averages are of course irrelevant when dealing with individuals, who should each be judged according to their own merit, not according to generalizations of the groups they belong to.

> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership

> Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

I don't think this part is inherently wrong, and could be proven or disproven with well designed studies.

He speaks about the `distribution of preferences and abilities`.

Going from a distribution to state that `women are worse then men at engineering` is a false narrative and COMPLETELY different. You probably didn't realize that because you already made your own politically-correct version of the truth on that subject, and refuse any discussion about those topics.

For example, what he said doesn't say anything about two specific individual women and men abilities.

About your second point. That's the whole issue! Bringing up any point of debate or discussion on those politically-driven topics will end up pissing of some people (while a majority might agree, but will stay silent because politically incorrect). It is very very sad that this is the state of affairs, and that we cannot discuss those sensible subjects anymore without being fully ostracized.

Here is a female first authored study from 2013 focused on the topic of Damore's memo exactly.

http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...

> The findings suggest that the persistent – and usually neglected average large advantage of boys in mechanical reasoning (MR) — orthogonal to g – might be behind their higher presence in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.

Example: average ability score of 100, standard deviation of 16 and average ability score of 90, standard deviation of 32. The 95th percentile cutoff for the first group would be about 164; the 95th percentile cutoff for the second group would be about 218. So even though the average member of group 1 has a higher ability score than the average member of group 2, an organisation which hired the best 5% of all candidates would have disproportionately more members of group 2 than group one.

Many media outlets omitted the italicized portion.

Discrimination of gender, race, and sexual preference is demonstrably real. This suit is a farce and I hope he loses.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

[2] https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/

You need to learn that people can have a different opinion then you, having read the same document.

> Damore was fired because of the outrage, not because of the article, but the outrage was manufactured by a sensationalist click machine and information overload culture literally championed by the company he was fired from.

Correct, and that's why his lawsuit is BS. He caused outrage both externally and internally. You had an employee that others would refuse to work with.

Of course he was fired.

"Birth control for blacks", "we need more jews in STEM", "no blacks in the whites only bathroom".

They're more offensive because unlike race there are very real and relevant biological differences when it comes to gender. And whether or not that applies to STEM probably shapes your viewpoints on this subject.

>then going on a self-promotional media crusade

If internally sharing a document within a company is bad, and externally talking about it once it was made public by another party who got you fired is also bad, what is in your opinion the acceptable and appropriate method to have this conversation?

That's why I included the part about the programming work environment generally being unpleasant and demanding. I didn't make the connection explicit, but "high paying job that sucks" is a preferential attractor for male workers. 90% of workplace deaths are men, men tend to do more things like "work on dangerous and dirty oil rigs", men tend to work more hours than women, and women tend to accumulate in more personally rewarding jobs such as teaching or social work. The end result is a gross earnings gap that basically disappears when you control for these sorts of choices.

So to be explicit: becoming a programmer is a choice that pays well, but is difficult work, requires a large time commitment to study, and is not intuitively gratifying. On that basis alone I'd expect outsized male participation.

>I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion

In terms of big-5 personality traits, the gendered differences are that women tend to score higher on Agreeableness and Neuroticism. I don't think it's particularly relevant to this whole discussion, though.

- Outreach to under-represented groups is a no-brainer (I assume Google is already doing this)

- Look at ways to make your interview / recruiting process as blind as possible - coding exercises, resume review and even behavioural questions can be done in a way that doesn't reveal someone's gender or race.

- Where blindness isn't possible, use data to figure out where there may be bias. Do certain individuals / teams / departments show bias in who they advance through the hiring process? If at least part of your process is blind this is even easier - look for evidence of candidates who did well until the process could no longer be gender / race blind and see if there's any bias introduced at that point.

OKRs mandating a fixed gender ratio are the worst way to go about things. It's supposedly common knowledge that any metric is going to be gamed, and doubly so if your career performance is based heavily on it, so it shouldn't be surprising that basing it heavily on a 50/50 ratio can often result in "hiring to quota". Long term, this ends up casting doubt on eminently qualified women and racialized folks.

Some of the best female engineers I know hate pro-diversity movements because of this.

It's a nasty situation. We want to make progress as society, which means quantifying that progress (quotas make this impossible). However, at the same time we are trying to make that progress to represent individuals and, yes, place them in lucrative jobs to level the playing field (which quotas assist).

> reason to believe that your hiring process is biased and you are missing out on qualified candidates

That is to my point. How could you justify that position if you have no way of measuring it? Find 50 lions and 50 white lions, put them in an enclosure and ask a scientist to tell you what percentage of lions are white based on that sample.

I'm not saying that we don't have to solve this, or that it has been solved. It hasn't. I really question our approach (and I don't have a better alternative, apart from eradicating gender stereotypes from a young age).

Are we still in the 1990's with a social equality facade?

I'm a libertarian who supports Damore in sprirt, but I don't love this lawsuit for the reasons given in the grandparent post.

The person who leaked it to vox should be on the chopping block.

It is illegal to prevent people from engaging in politics, in California.

I think it's made to seem that way by media coverage and political propaganda(especially from the left) more than it actually is. The problem is that it's easy to analyze something by arbitrary groups but in doing so often if not usually miss things (indeed this was one of Damore's key themes in his original essay).

The rhetoric may be actualizing, but I still think it's more a case of bad analytical generalizations than actual decision-making. Although, it's getting worse, as the whole drama with Jordan Peterson last year over pronouns demonstrated. At the core of his concern seemed to be he growing number of increasingly narrow and increasingly arbitrary suspect class definitions (or whatever they call it in Canada).

The original concept of a suspect class in the US was codified to serve as a legal guidelines for determining whether discrimination had taken place. The idea was to balance the ideal of democratic freedom to enact laws with the political reality that some clearly identified recognized groups (mainly Black Americans) had not been allowed to participate in the democratic process that produced the laws under which they had to conform. Many of those laws were shown to be prima facie discriminatory and evidence suggested plenty more were intended to be discriminatory in practice. And by virtue of minority status, they'd be unable to effectively challenge those discriminatory laws through democratic means. Women classified as a quasi-suspect class by virtue of historical disenfranchisement, despite their not being a minority.

But, it has been at least century since women were granted the right to vote. "Women as a class" have been one of the strongest political factions in the United States for decades. Roe v. Wade was 1973, a decade before any Millenial was even born. Pandering to women is pervasive in US politics on both sides.

The narrative that women had no voice, political will, or influence until Last Thursday is persistent and massive historical revisionism.

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 many specialties are male dominated or female dominated). And if (2) were true we should see the same profession have different gender biases in different cultures. But I don’t think we see that either. My understanding is that generally the direction of gender bias we see in other highly gender biased fields is consistent cross-culturally. (nurse, prison guard, career criminal, construction worker, child care worker, etc).

It would actually be a rather interesting theory to test, and I would hope someone does test the theory. However your claim is not currently known to be true, rather just a promising theory.

No, that is not my argument. This is about the second time in one week where I've posted "x was a bad idea in context", and someone else has replied with "So, your argument is no one should be allowed to do x ever?", so clearly I am being very bad at communicating. As with last time, I'll try to explain my position in a little more detail in the hope that it will help.

My position is that, if you are already at risk of being an alt-right poster-boy (thanks to having been forced to do interviews with alt-right YouTubers because nobody else would interview you fairly, or something), and if you are not actually a supporter of the alt-right position, it is probably a good idea to avoid doing and saying things that give the further impression that you are and want to be an alt-right poster boy. (If you do want to be a supporter of the alt-right position, by all means, more power to you, but then arguments about joking are moot - you're an intentional and happy member of the alt-right and we can continue discussions having established that. But for now I'm assuming that's not the case.)

This is a different position from "Don't tell jokes," or "Don't tell jokes about the KKK," or even "Don't tell jokes that make it sound like you support the KKK," or even "Don't make non-joking commentary that supports certain things the KKK is doing."

A brief aside there - I don't understand how that tweet is a joke. I think it's meant earnestly, and I think it stands up as a piece of earnest commentary and I think it does him and his position a disservice to read it as a joke. The internal title names are cool. That's why they picked them. The KKK wanted, and still wants, to attract membership, and cool-sounding titles are something that pushes people from neutral to excited. This isn't a particularly novel observation, but it's certainly a true one. (And the KKK isn't alone; plenty of secret societies of varying levels of racism have done similar things through history.) The job of smart, non-KKK-sympathizing people is to recognize that this is a tactic, and to go find some other less racist outlet for your desire to be called "Grand Wizard," like tabletop gaming, instead of expressing approval for the KKK's marketing tactics.

This is also a different position from "That joke is offensive." I did not claim that the joke was offensive, nor did anyone else, and I think "Actually, that's not offensive and you're wrong because you were offended" is a terribly fallacious rhetorical strategy when nobody has claimed to be offended.

That's what he did! That is, that's what he did when someone finally got around to asking him about it in an environment where he trusted that he'd be given time to say his side in an unedited manner, which does not include any of the hit pieces you have linked. I believe it's mentioned in his interview with Jordan Peterson, which is the first public interview he gave.

Again you are blaming him for your own error.

This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.

First, it is absolutely a personal attack. You're attacking his character and coding ability, which are not relevant to the topic. Ok, technically, you're passively suggesting it via speculative commentary but it amounts to the same thing.

Second, your inferences aren't reasonable, and they're unreasonable in exactly the manner that one would predict based on consumption of inflammatory and deliberately misleading propaganda aimed primarily at smearing Damore. For example, you inferred that he "didn't say anything or apologize," apparently relying on entirely on hostile bloggers to convey that message to you on his behalf. Remember that until this blew up, he was a private individual. He has no platform of his own and no way to offer any response that your chosen sources did not provide to you. So it is completely and utterly unreasonable to hold him accountable in such a way.

Furthermore, the fixation with LinkedIn is unreasonable. LinkedIn profiles are notoriously unreliable and many are neglected and incomplete, since many members are not actively seeking employment (yet retain membership for the social networking). If you had looked at Damore's whole profile rather than just the image, it was clear that not much effort had been put into it. This is consistent with his story that he had not been actively seeking employment when Google offered him an interview based on his Chess playing.

Which brings us to the chess issue. And yes, it seems that Damore stated on his resume that he's a FIDE Master, a term of art that it seems clear that he misused. Specifically he wrote "FIDE Master in Chess (>99th Percentile)". Other claims about chess-playing on his resume seem to check out as far as I can tell[0][1]. So yes, it's an interesting question why does he say that on his resume. I have not found an explanation, but can certainly think of others not mentioned in that stackexchange link, such as he misunderstood proper use of the term. Obviously a mistake, one that shouldn't be made, but nothing like the dishonesty you're accusing him of, especially when you give him no opportunity to explain himself.

Meanwhile, in this obsession with minor errors in an inexperienced young person's first resume or linkedin profile(errors that are easily cleared-up in a phone interview if you actually care), you are apparently giving a pass to someone who anonymously leaked a co-workers' fair and well-reasoned internal posting to outrage media to encourage hit pieces and start a witch hunt. ... which ultimately resulted in the employer being hit with a ton of negative press and a high-profile lawsuit.

So, no, your inferences are not remotely reasonable or appropriate by my estimation.

[0] http://www.uschess.org/results/2003/nya/?page=WINNERS&xsecti...

[1] I don't know what "Board 1 and Conference Champion" means, and "Rise of Nations" is a PC strategy game.

People that read that are wrong (at least sometimes), since Linkedin shows degrees-in-progress and completed degrees the same way. Not ideal interface, for sure, but that's what it is. People that do not know that make mistakes. It's their mistake.

> Could that be an accident? Might it just be incompetence? Maybe.

Surely, it may be incompetence - not understanding how Linkedin profile works. But it's not Damore's incompetence.

> That he then quickly removed things when called out with neither explanation nor apology

If people misunderstood what was on his Linkedin page, and undeservedly called him a liar and attacked him for that, and he removed the controversial item despite it being true - I think demanding apology from him for you misunderstanding him and falsely calling him a liar is taking the entitlement thing too far. If somebody owes an apology, it's people who called him a liar despite him publishing completely true information - but of course I do not hold by breath for that.

> fits in with the "lies to make himself look good" narrative.

Surely it fits your narrative. The problem is it is not true.

> A person who had made an innocent error generally feels bad about the error and says so.

Nobody owes you feeling bad for telling the truth and you misunderstanding him. It would be nice if people who did the misunderstanding felt bad and did not blame others for their mistake, but I recognize this is not how the Internet works. If you misunderstood something, it's other guy who should be feeling bad for not working harder to prevent any chance of you making a mistake. The other guy is always responsible, he's clearly either a liar or an idiot for letting you to misunderstand him.

> Your thing about LinkedIn form design seems to be pure fiction. I just checked: you can enter any text you like, including no text at all.

That misunderstanding thing happened to you again. I haven't said you cannot enter free text in Linkedin. I said the form does not have completion status for education. Yes, you can hack around that by adding various text to a degree program name or any other field. If Damore knew in advance there would be a mob of hostile attackers scrutinizing everything he ever did under a microscope to find even a tiniest flaw and blow it up out of proportion, he would probably do it too. But he just wrote true facts about his educational record, without thinking about being extra defensive and using tools given to him by Linkedin. Linkedin provides tools to set beginning and end time for educational record, and program name, but does not have a setting for "incomplete" or "in progress" status.

> This is not a personal attack; this is me pointing out facts of his behavior and reasonable inferences.

You "reasonable inferences" - which, as far as blaming others for your misunderstanding goes are not reasonable at all - are what is the personal attack, since they seek to impugn Damore's character without addressing his actual arguments. That's the definition of personal attack.