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".
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.