[curun1r]

> He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities.

He basically said the opposite, but people have been so interested in triggering off the 'lowered the bar' phrasing to show their outrage that they're (seemingly willfully) ignoring the rest of the sentence which completely changed the meaning.

But 'by lowering false negatives' is hugely important. Google's hiring process has a lot of false negatives. These are qualified engineers who weren't hired that could have been successful at Google. This allows for 'lowering the bar' without sacrificing quality by not subjecting minority/female candidates to the more arbitrary/capricious stages of the Google hiring process that eliminate so many otherwise-qualified candidates.

Imagine if one of the ways that we chose to address diversity in the tech workplace was to exempt qualified female/minority H1-B candidates from the lottery and automatically approve their visas? It wouldn't make them any less qualified, since they could've gotten their visa through the normal lottery process. But it would 'lower the bar' by making it significantly more likely that they'd get visas. The post-interview stages of Google's hiring process are similar in their often-arbitrary selecting of who gets through.

It's also, on Google's part, a smart move to address their PR concerns. It allows them to increase female/minority hiring, thereby satisfying public calls for more diversity, without sacrificing quality. All they have to do is look into their process at where qualified diversity candidates are getting rejected and stop doing that. It's a luxury that other companies with fewer surplus potential hires don't have when trying to improve the diversity of their workforce. But possibly more importantly, it's not helping to improve the diversity of the industry as a whole, it only helps to make Google's stats look better. Google's standards for engineers mean that their false negatives can usually get jobs elsewhere without much difficulty. By taking this approach to diversity hiring, they're just shifting their own workforce demographics without helping the industry as a whole do the same.

[ZeroGravitas]

"lowering the bar" has an actual meaning.

"To lower the standards of quality that are expected of or required for something." -- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/lower+the+bar

If he didn't mean to say that, he should retract that phrase and apologize for saying something he didn't mean to say.

You getting "triggered" by people using the standard definition of a common idiom isn't helpful.

Parents often tell their children that a lie about what they did is worse than the original crime. I hope Mr. Damore didn't take this smug "I didn't actually say that women were inferior, it's all about preferences" tone that seems to be the first line of defence online, in his HR meetings only to be asked "So, what's this bit about race and the "science" of IQ you mentioned? Is IQ a preference?"

I'll note that the argument you present about Google only diversity-washing themselves at the cost of others having lower diversity, is the same argument that people make about their green energy efforts. In that area at least they've gone to great lengths to ensure that they actually improve the whole industry, not just steal the glory for themselves and I wouldn't be at all suprised if they had some very smart people ensuring the same was the case in this instance.

[curun1r]

He should call out his mistake, yes. But apologize? Expecting that from him seems beyond the pale. Language isn't like contracts where any mistake by the author gets to be interpreted however the reader chooses. Instead, we're supposed to look for the intended meaning, either using context or by asking for clarification. If you use the definition you cited, his sentence becomes self-contradictory and, thus, requires clarification, not an immediate rush to judgment. Instead, everyone has assumed the worst about what he said, gotten him fired and vilified him. I'd have a hard time apologizing to people who overreact like that.

Had the reaction been one of kindness, understanding and a desire for cohesiveness where people tried to point out misconceptions and alert him to how his language was being received ("when you say 'lowered the bar' it makes me think 'less qualified', so perhaps you didn't meant that?"), this whole blow-up could have been avoided. Instead people reacted with righteous indignation and jumped to labeling him a misogynist and a bigot. At that point, all hope of a productive outcome, for him and Google at least, was lost.

For my part, I'm less interested in whether Damore really is bigot and a misogynist or any virtue of his opinions. I'm only defending what he could have possibly meant because I see so many people jumping to their own incomplete conclusions. This whole incident, to me, was more about how unproductive our reactions are to anything relating to a sensitive subject. People are so quick to trigger off anything resembling an assault on one of their sacred cows that they never take the time to figure out the intended meaning. I'm so sick of walking on eggshells knowing that I have to watch every single sentence and word choice because they'll be taken out of context and used against me. We're losing nuance in our discussions and it's creating a polarization of thought on each side that I find dangerous and divisive...there's no room for middle-ground thinkers to participate without being attacked by one or both sides. This makes those people either gravitate towards one of the extremes or disengage entirely.