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by leereeves 3043 days ago
He did cite evidence for his claims, but the most widely circulated copies of the memo removed his citations.
2 comments

I mean the citations weren't particularly thorough, and he took some liberties with interpretation.
Not to mention cherry picking what to cite in order to support his arguments.
I agree Damore's sources were unconvincing, but I've searched for sources disputing one of his most controversial claims (that women are more "neurotic" - an unfortunately named Big Five personality trait - than men) and haven't found any.

Do you know of any?

The Big Five is getting outdated. It was a popular method in the 90's, but doesn't hold up today for biological factor analysis because its lexical nature opens it to social biases:

>And that is what the Big Five represents: a consistent model of how humans reflect individuality using language, no more. There were no considerations of findings in neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, experimental psychology, observations of behavior of people or animals in real situations – none of this was used at the research stage leading to the development of the Big Five. In this sense we can say that the Big Five does not represent the structure of temperament or the structure of biologically based traits, even though lexical perception reflects some elements of it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3903487/

The big five can still be used for self-reported correlational analysis, but Damore used it in an argument against social constructs, when the method itself can be heavily biased by the social constructs he's arguing against.

His statements were within the mainstream interpretations of modern clinical psychology and evolutionary biology. That doesn't make them certain facts by any means, but it's important that we not misrepresent things here.
Are you implying the lawyers in the case didn't read the citations? Please.
No, I'm responding to the claim in the comment above that Damore made statements "without citing direct evidence".

Though it is probably true that the lawyers in the case didn't read the citations. It wasn't their job to determine whether Damore's statements were scientifically accurate, and they stated that his statements were discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment, regardless of the scientific references and analysis.