The guy's post was science, according to scientists - 5 of them have now spoken up saying that. Maybe there'll be more.
With respect to "why not try to solve it", it's a reasonable question. The guy answers that too - he is all for trying to solve it. He even makes suggestions about new ways to do it, like encouraging pair programming.
But he feels the current solutions aren't working and are, in fact, causing bigger problems. They might also be illegal. That seems like a good reason to pause for a moment and re-evaluate if the current strategy is a good one.
He also made a wider point, that was actually his main point, that Google's strategy on women in tech was breaking the internal culture and causing a severe lack of other kinds of diversity, namely, political and ideas-based diversity. He said that people couldn't challenge ideas around gender diversity and the best way to fix it without intimidation and fear. Google claimed they totally support people having discussions like that, and then immediately fired him, which shows he was right.
Why did the memo's author think that Google's current hiring practices were flawed? I mean, what empirical evidence? Were there teams full of "diversity" hires that were performing below par?
"* Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]
* A high priority queue and special treatment for “diversity” candidates
* Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate
* Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)
* Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]
These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology [7] that can irreparably harm Google."
There are some hyperlinks that are presumably citations but they go to internal links so we don't know what they say.
I asked for empirical evidence that these initiatives had led to bad results at Google. If the biological research so directly contradicts Google's aims with these diversity initiatives, then we should be able to measure the negative impact, no? That Google has had these initiatives for years and still has ratios nowhere near the 50% that the author fears is a harmful goal, belies the notion that Google is conducting its recruitment in a reckless, diversity-at-all-costs way.
Of course having read the memo, I know that the author does not cite any such empirical evidence, besides begging-the-question anecdata such as "I've gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues". While I believe the author to be smart and am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about being sincere, I question how he can fill 10 pages with observations and boilerplate (including a trite table of what he thinks "left" and "right" biases are) and not be able to mention actual observed consequences of Google's hiring practices having gone awry. It suggests to me that he hasn't really been openminded or willing to investigate both sides of the issue.
> I asked for empirical evidence that these initiatives had led to bad results at Google.
Where is the empirical evidence that these initiatives had led to good results at Google?
And assuming we can measure both the good and bad side effects of such initiatives, does the good outweigh the bad?
The biggest piece of empirical evidence that these initiatives have led to bad results at Google is everything that has happened in the aftermath of the memo being published and found considerable support both in and outside the company.
Had the initiatives been universally good and whose goodness is easy to defend empirically, I would likely have no or at most very few bad results to present to you in response to your question.
Or because they believed his manifesto to be both bullshit and a legal liability. Especially as the company -- which Damore accused of using its "money to water only one side of the lawn [i.e. women's]" -- fights off a possible class-action lawsuit [0] and an ongoing federal investigation [1] alleging discrimination against women.
Again, why should Google put the guy who lacks basic research skills (again, being ignorant of anti-discrimination cases brought by men) to be in charge of gathering and analyzing data?
Ok. You throw around terms like "ignorant", "massive error" etc; but I don't think your own assertions are not founded.
What "basic facts and history" are you alluding to, and how do you think they are relevant?
Why do you feel justified saying the author is "ruled by his emotions"? You made blank assertions without explicitly backing them up ("Only someone ignorant..", "only someone ruled by his emotions..")
You say his premises are not "coherent in their arrangement" but can you give an demonstrate this? Just saying "clearly he's ignorant" etc isn't enough to convince me you are right about the quoted snippet, let alone the whole memo.
As was stated in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974650 you are nit-picking a memo intended to invite discussion, but name calling ("ignorant") without providing at least a similar level of citation, or explanation, yourself is not constructive.
That's hardly a good option. Google hired him as an engineer, to work with his team and build things. With this manifesto, he's made it very hard for his team to work with him, and alienated at least a third of his colleagues. Why would Google want to keep around an engineer in that situation?
The firing is justified from the point of view of the company, they want someone that can contribute, and he's just effectively removed himself from that pool. In my opinion, this is a bigger part of why they fired him, and the fact that they disagreed with his policies was just a cherry on top.
Actually he hasn't made it hard for his team to work with him. Rather, they choose to make it hard for themselves to work with him, because they believe his views on politics and gender science make him a "bad person" who must be shunned to teach him a lesson.
The world is full of religious people, Trump supporters, conservatives, and people who agree that men and women are biologically different and that might affect their life choices. Adults can go to work and collaborate productively with these people.
Google is quite clearly now full of people who are not adults in this respect, and who feel it's totally OK to refuse to work with someone they never even met because of a memo they wrote on political and policy issues. And their management supports them in this.
From the companies point of view this may mean they are justified in firing him, but California law apparently disagrees - you aren't allowed to fire someone for their political affiliations, and that is true even if other employees are refusing to work with them. That would require you to fire those other employees, as they are the ones refusing to do their work unless a legally impermissible act is taken.
oh please... how he acts is their fault? are you serious?
if he was a white-supremacist who wrote a scientifically-backed manifesto about biological differences with his black coworkers, would you still be blaming the people who are 'shunning' him?
What? He is an engineer, not a social scientist. He lacks the qualifications to perform such a study. Why would Google pay him to do that?
Further, his job was to make more money for the company than he cost it. The negative publicity he generated, right or wrong, means he is no longer doing his job. Firing him meant the managers did theirs.
If there was any evidence as to the utility of these things, then the argument might look rather different. But the memo - as you already know - states that Google management presents no empirical evidence in support of its policies, so it's reasonable to assume the firm doesn't have any evidence in either direction.
For what do you lack evidence? The value of diversity, the value of programs designed to increase diversity, or the value of the specific programs at Google?
What's the problem with scrutiny? If these policies are based on premises that aren't true, wouldn't it be better to discard them in favor of policies that are based on premises that are true? How would we do that without a discussion?
Sorry, why do we assume that those premises are true? And which premises in particular, because much of that memo consists of begging the question and/or the author's personal opinion. For example, in the TL:DR: "Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety." Uh, OK. Obviously "shaming into silence" is not in any part of Google's stated mission. But I guess that's because it's an unconscious bias, and if only Google were truly woke, they'd realize that, right?
Or how about:
> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and whiner
So the memo's author is apparently a prophet of truth but can't even use Google (or Bing, if you will) to look up the times that men have sued on allegations of discrimination? If there weren't law that protected men, those lawsuits would not be brought to court by a competent lawyer, nevermind won (as in the case of Hooter's):
So given the memo's author inability to look up simple case law, you'll have to excuse my hesitance in not accepting that all of his premises are either true or relevant to Google's diversity efforts. Which is why I ask for any empirical evidence that would support his allegations that Google's hiring processes chase diversity in a way that is harmful to the company's performance or even in a way that is unreasonable. Given that Google's stock seems to be still doing quite well, that it still seems to be hiring people of the author's political mindset (including, obviously, the author himself), and that Google's demographic numbers are not anywhere near reaching parity with overall demographics, I'd say the burden of evidence is on the memo's author.
You don't have to show that Google is actually succeeding in it's efforts to bring in "diversity" and equalize representation among it's workforce to match the general population to question the premise that the purported effort is based on. You don't even have to show that they are making a serious effort. Most likely they aren't. It's very likely they know full well what kind of people are likely to make valuable contributions to the company and they are probably not eager to jeopardize that.
If that is the case, then as far as I'm concerned, you don't even have to show that there is a real harm to the purported victims (as Damore sees them), it is enough to question what the big charade is based on. Are the premises that this supposed diversity push is based on valid? If not, what exactly are we doing here?
Yes, perhaps you don't have to argue all of that. But Damore did. Perhaps if he hadn't made those assertions, his memo wouldn't be seen as particularly interesting or controversial.
But we don't have to engage in such hypotheticals. Let's consider the premise that Damore's memo is simply a call to debate based on science and facts. In my opinion, such a non-biased, open-minded essay would not include this kind of assertion:
> We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner [10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is being spent to water only one side of the lawn.
Only someone ignorant of basic facts and history would make this sweeping claim. And only someone ruled by his emotions would be unable to take a step back and do a Google search to see if anti-discrimination law has been used on behalf of men. Given that kind of massive error, or inability to recognize one own's ignorance, I don't think we should continue assuming that Damore's premises are factual or coherent in their arrangement. Which is why I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt in saying that it'd be better if he could have actual empirical evidence on the harm of Google's diversity programs. Just because his memo contains facts doesn't mean that it's truthful, if those facts are used loosely to further the author's emotional appeals.
edit: Fixed the formatting to show that [10], in the original memo, refers to a footnote and contains a hyperlink.
The footnote:
[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are
expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more
often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood, due to our gendered idea of agency. This
discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear
of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”
Nobody ever said that the memo was perfectly conceived or written. If you're saying he overstated his case in the passage you quoted I would probably agree. But the standard for inviting a conversation is not a perfectly formed argument from the get-go, a standard like that would make it impossible to have a conversation at all. So I'm still not clear on what exactly he wrote that would earn him exile and banishment in the judgement of a reasonable person open to having a discussion on the topics he raised.
I was just thinking, since I'm one of those "diversity" candidates that never made it to an interview. does it mean that I'm a worse candidate, because even though my profile is favoured as you highlighted I've never made it to an interview.
Google is famous for nixing qualified candidates for all kinds of nonsensical reasons. I would never read anything into failing to get an interview or offer letter there.
If you believe women and/or minorities are biologically predisposed to underperform white males in tech, then it makes sense to offer them more help. That offer only increases "tension" if you don't believe the biological premise. So which is it? You can't have it both ways.
> But he feels the current solutions aren't working and are, in fact, causing bigger problems. They might also be illegal. That seems like a good reason to pause for a moment and re-evaluate if the current strategy is a good one.
In fact, he goes farther. He says this "Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." Where is the science to back that up?
> Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business." Where is the science to back that up?
The same question could be asked for the converse statement that represents those pushing for these policies: "Discrimination to reach equal representation is fair, cooperative, and good for business."
The truth is that we don't know either way. My biggest frustration with those arguing in either direction is that no one has really put forth any specific and objectively measurable ways to evaluate these policies.
I personally believe that diversity is economically valuable, but that how valuable it is depends on the task/goals of a team. In some circumstances it will be very valuable and other it will be of negative value. And in many cases it may be of negligible value relative to other things you can optimize for.
What kind of diversity is another valid thing to question? Why are certain kinds of diversity like gender and race given priority over other kinds of diversity such as cognitive (aspie/autistic to neurotypical) diversity, socioeconomic diversity, national origin diversity, urban/rural diversity, etc.
If a team/company is composed entirely of the same race and or gender but every member is from a different country are they more or less diverse than a team/company composed of all Americans of various races and genders?
These are all important questions and it's good and healthy to express skepticism.
Discrimination is by definition unfair; therefore divisive. I thought everyone agrees on that.
It's very hypocritical to scream how discrimination against women or POC is bad and needs to be routed out, only to turn around and start discriminating yourself.
Discriminating against anyone (yes, even people you disagree with or don't like) is unfair.
Treating people differently based on their gender is sexist.
Smearing, bullying and firing somebody for disagreeing with you is bigoted.
The hypocrisy on display in this whole brouhaha is astounding.
What we should provide is equality of opportunity (i.e. anyone should be given a fair and equal treatment in an interview) not equality of outcome (someone should be given a job, just because they represent a certain segment of population).
Exactly. I really can't understand why someone would fail to see this. Unless they have some other definition of equality. But I genuinely would like to hear other definitions and discuss the semantics of that word in the social context.
You're right that a number of scientists have come out to say his post was science. I'm saying that they are not the conclusive authority on the posters' intent.
He is of course entitled to feel and think whatever he wants, but maybe a little old-fashioned advice would help here: measure twice, cut once. He clearly didn't think through the effects of posting a stern essay to a company-wide board on a subject that is really quite touchy in the midst of one of the more socially-turbulent periods in the past 20 years.
If he wants to prove it's that desperate, he probably should have worked harder on his essay or social skills, and found a better way to introduce discussion.
And we haven't even confronted his perceptions yet. I have to wonder who exactly feels afraid and intimidated by the conditions. Him, and who else? Instead of resigning to anxiety that he might be confronted for such a strongly-pointed diatribe, maybe he should have considered that his understanding of the situation might be skewed?
I can't speak for anybody else, but his facts didn't support his conclusions for me. His timing was even worse. If it's a discussion he wanted, then maybe he should have researched tact first.
If you insist on judging arguments by appeals to authority, which I agree is much faster than wading through all the research papers themselves, then there are no higher authorities on gender science than actual biologists who study the topic full time. Almost by definition, they are the most qualified. By all means be skeptical but you must have reasons. Otherwise you are no better than people who reject evolution because they really don't want to believe it's true.
With respect to his essay skills and tact - they are just fine. He makes it abundantly clear he doesn't want to offend people and is not describing individuals, but only the statistical preferences of large populations. You are shooting the messenger in another desperate attempt to ignore the message. Could a few words have been tweaked here or there? Sure. Should he have written it? Yes - he alleges that Google is engaged in illegal behaviour. Google, like all large firms, teaches their employees that it's their responsibility to flag illegal and problematic behaviour and writing such a well researched memo in order to do so is more than most companies could expect.
> there are no higher authorities on gender science than actual biologists who study the topic full time
Only one (Dr Soh) has supported him that I've seen thus far - she seems to have only got her PhD this year and she studies sexual paraphilia via fMRI (which doesn't have a great reputation.) Not exactly "full time gender science study".
By way of contrast, there's PZ Myers - PhD in Biology in 1985, been teaching since 1993 - who thinks Damore is an idiot.
There were four others too. They published their views on a website (Quillette) that was immediately DDoSd off the internet - presumably by the sort of extremists who now control Google and who did not want anyone to see the evidence that Damore might have a point.
Damore is not an idiot. The people who are attacking him in these ways are though: it's pure anti-intellectualism.
And by the way, counting experts is not a valid way to decide things, it's just a heuristic.
Damore has 5 who point out that he isn't making the science up, but what actually matters is that there are hundreds of studies and papers that support his basic position. Dr Soh points that out. It's not just her opinion vs other people's opinions. It's the opinion of thousands of scientists who have published research that shows all sorts of preference differences between gender.
Then it seems we disagree on what the core issue is. I don't think it is a matter of gender science. I think he's using research in gender science to push an ideology that he's attempting to form grounds in his attached research.
I see it as a social issue primarily, with considerations that should include gender science, but not be based solely upon it.
For reference to my thinking on the matter I'll confer to one of my favourite scientists (as he is to many), Mr Feynman:
>> "Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does with it."
Let me ask you this - what ideology is he pushing?
Damore's piece can be read as supporting one of two policies, depending on how you interpret it:
1. Adopt alternative approaches to increasing the number of women at Google.
or
2. Leave things alone and don't try to interfere with the outcome of the standard hiring process.
I think he argued more for (1), in which case his "ideology" would if anything be rather close to Google's standard ideology and it's only a debate about means rather than ends.
But if you read it as (2), e.g. because he says he doesn't support socially engineering tech to get a particular outcome, that's still not an ideology. Doing nothing is not an ideology, it's an absence of ideology.
So I find myself disagreeing with you on this basic point. It's Google and Damore's opponents who are pushing an ideology here. Not him.
To begin: He built his own categorization of political alliances based on moral outlooks that he named with a clear bias. (see page 2)
Here he tries to remove himself from the rankings but his rhetoric signifies a preference. The weight of the language on one side versus the other induces this effect. He produced this ranking without reference, except noting that these are his own observations at a single campus.
After displaying a chart of associative terms he goes on to implicate Google's bias as lying on the left of his custom political spectrum. Shortly thereafter, he decries Google's particular bias as being harmful. Harmful to nobody in particular, so an assumed ethereal everybody... or himself. In fact, he spends most of the rest of the paper decrying left-handed politics as he's defined them, and continues to define them. (Here his reference is to a WSJ editorial article, hosted offsite. Their editorial sections are generally known to be significantly right-leaning. It's full of conjecture without proofs in between notes about studies.)
I found this particular passage interesting:
>Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt
became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal
democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
Now while it's a footnote, he's making severe assertions about history with no references at all.
He's also quite enthusiastically twisting the content of his sources to suit his needs. For instance, in the Scientific American article where he derives his "PC-Authoritarian" term to label Google the author of the SA article attributes that to people who declare biological differences as the source of group differences. Of course I have my suspicions he didn't use this term specifically so he could cry vindication once he was fired, but that's just me. The article in fact uses the term "PC-egalitarian"[0] (an apparent other end of the PC political spectrum) who debut programs for specific diverse groups of people to increase their inclusion in the larger community by a sort of 'hand-up'. He evades this point completely.
I could go further but it I'll try to boil down to my point, before I end up writing an essay myself.
He's pushing a hard-right ideology. One that evidenced itself by tangential ramblings about communism in the footnotes, linking to dubious blog and editorial sources (even if they were written by scientists, there are more opinion pieces than are warranted being[1]), and he's repeating (in more "smart" rhetoric than usual) far-right talking points.[2] Further, he wants to be allowed to use Google as a forum where he can say whatever he wants, and will probably cry "transgressors" if somebody tells him to stop being an asshole.
[0] "PC-Egalitarians tended to attribute a cultural basis for group differences, believed that differences in group power springs from societal injustices, and tended to support policies to prop up historically disadvantages groups. Therefore, the emotional response of this group to discriminating language appears to stem from an underlying motivation to achieve diversity through increased equality, and any deviation from equality is assumed to be caused by culture. Their beliefs lead to advocating for a more democratic governance."
[1] Majority right-wing news editorial sections, blogs that exist on scientific websites, and political studies that took place in Europe where the base level "conservatism" is probably closer to American centrism citing the conscientiousness of conservatives.
[2] Personally, it sounds like it came right out of the halls of "red pill/mens rights" forums. They will brigade an intellectual-sounding attempt at legitimacy once in a while by attempting to veil their ideas in a shroud of sloppy rhetoric and tertiary-source material.
The paper's primary focus seems to be removing the programs that were put in place to aid diversity by setting up programs for historically disadvantaged groups, and railing on the "left".
What does "it's science" mean? Do you mean to say it's fact based? Because that's not the same thing. Science is a careful application of the scientific method. Damore did not do that. Instead, it seems this author is using the term science instead of factual because a) it sounds more credible and b) alliteration.
With respect to "why not try to solve it", it's a reasonable question. The guy answers that too - he is all for trying to solve it. He even makes suggestions about new ways to do it, like encouraging pair programming.
But he feels the current solutions aren't working and are, in fact, causing bigger problems. They might also be illegal. That seems like a good reason to pause for a moment and re-evaluate if the current strategy is a good one.
He also made a wider point, that was actually his main point, that Google's strategy on women in tech was breaking the internal culture and causing a severe lack of other kinds of diversity, namely, political and ideas-based diversity. He said that people couldn't challenge ideas around gender diversity and the best way to fix it without intimidation and fear. Google claimed they totally support people having discussions like that, and then immediately fired him, which shows he was right.