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by jcims 2139 days ago
edit: you've already been lumped on, no need to reply to more of the same here.

Now that the dust has settled a bit on the memo, I'm curious about this take:

>That employee argued that people, such as people like me, were inherently less competent than others due to aspects of their gestation.

I didn't get that much of a dichotomy from the memo. To me he focused much more on interests than competency or capability, and he went through some effort to indicate that the effect was limited, including this summary at the top:

>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.

Then followed with a little chart showing two distributions with a lot of overlap.

I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself, which seemed to be a ham-fisted attempt at exploring how we prioritize various metrics with diversity and inclusion. It was obviously premature as well, based on his own charts the effects he was discussing wouldn't come into play until we're approaching something much more even than we have today.

Ultimately the way Google handled it seemed rather cowardly. Damore's personal story adds a little complexity to the situation and I really feel that he touched a third rail that might not have been as obvious to him at the time.

1 comments

> I felt like the story of the memo overtook the memo itself

And that story was mostly fictional. The memo itself bares little resemblance to most of the reporting about it.

I think there's something to be learned from that difference though, which is what drove me to ask about it. It's easy to assume that zero of it was in good faith and discredit everyone that echoes that sentiment as a deliberate manipulator. I just have a hard time accepting that. I do believe there is a lot of deliberate manipulation, but there are also a lot of folks that are frustrated and disappointed based on their own lived experience and I can see how the memo could be read entirely differently.

Squaring off over unfalsifiable claims about intent and impact isn't going to get us anywhere, in the Damore case it's literally 'he said/she said'. We need to navigate it piece by piece and try to apply a balance of reason and empathy to try to get to a place of understanding.

> I can see how the memo could be read entirely differently

Sure, but you can't hold the original author responsible for how it is being rewritten and reinterpreted in other people's minds. It's not a reasonable expectation that everyone should write everything with concern for how every cultural intersection might interpret it. That simply can't scale.

100%. I really could not agree more with you. I just feel that having the same stalemate of intent vs impact over and over isn't going to yield any new results. If I'm able to understand what puts the blinders up in tricky discussions, I'm better equipped to get past them and a little bit closer to unpacking the next layer.