[RangerScience]

I found that JD's document was a moderately anti-diversity screed, tho. I did a deep read (the document, everything the document linked to, most of the things that those linked to) back when it all went down.

IMO, while James raised a valid question ("how do we know any of this is working, or even can work?"), some of his mistakes were in attempting to answer it (instead of solidly beginning a conversation); attempting to answer it on his own (instead of recruiting a diverse group of backgrounds to answer it); attempting to present his answers as more substantial than the underlying investigation could support (instead of doing a substantive sociological investigation); in the answers he provided (aligned with historical misogynistic orthodoxy); how he presented those answers (in a way not inviting or encouraging questioning); etc. I really, really wonder what would have happened if he'd sought out diverse co-authors.

Ironically, (AFAICT) the entire core issue of diversity in the first place is answering questions from/with only one perspective; and (AFAICT) much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.

So there really wasn't any possible way for him to succeed at anything beyond raising the question, on his own.

[civilized]

I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article. It's about people who had fresh perspectives getting shut down by authorities who were mad about what they said. And how those authorities always have an excuse in terms of something the person didn't say or do perfectly.

If Damore didn't perfectly solve America's diversity problems in one swoop, I guess that's a mark against him -- but what about the people who attacked him rather than helping to realize his vision of a more candid, psychologically safe discussion of corporate diversity policy? People like Sundar Pichai, very rich, comfortable, powerful folks who chose to rhetorically demonize Damore rather than showing literally any courage to critique his points in a nuanced way?

And no, it wasn't an anti-diversity screed. Powerful people said it was, so now people scramble to say how the powerful people were kinda right. They weren't. They lied.

[RangerScience]

I understand why you're assuming I didn't read the linked article, but I'm not sure (or perhaps disinterested?) in proving that I did. SSC is excellent, has some of my top favorite things on the entire internet, and I don't think I've seen anything from it that I'd consider problematic or of poor quality.

TBH, I didn't pay much attention to what others said about JD's document. I saw there was a controversy, looked at a few things about that controversy, then went to the source and came to my own conclusions. Those were some of my conclusions.

Sure, JD didn't say diversity was bad. He said something along the lines of what I'll paraphrase as "these are the insurmountable blockers to this kind of success for people who aren't like me." Which, like... if you don't see how that's the problem, I can 100% throw some effort trying to communicate to you how that's the problem. Just ask :)

Here's questions: Do you feel like your reply, here, was in any way a critique of my points in a nuanced way? Do you feel like what I've presented of my take on JD's document was a critique of his points in a nuanced way?

[ALittleLight]

I read Damore's document and your summary and description of it seems entirely foreign and inconsistent to me. For example, you summarize it as "these are the insurmountable blockers to this kind of success for people who aren't like me". In Damore's document he discusses ways to promote diversity within Google by accounting for differences between men and women and adjusting Google's hiring and promotion practices to focus less on traits that are more represented among men.

In other words, Damore does not view diversity problems as insurmountable blockers. Damore also says of himself that he is less likely to be assertive in ways that are rewarded at Google and explains that efforts to appreciate traits that are better represented among women would also benefit men evincing those traits. In other words, Damore doesn't break things down into "people like me" versus "people not like me". It seems like your summary is completely wrong.

I've noticed that a lot of Damore critics have very strong opinions that seem not well informed by Damore's actual writing. Can you highlight any specific thing from Damore's document that is wrong?

[RangerScience]

I think I can. Here's the document: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideol...

JD says: "On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways", and then has the nice overlapping bimodal distribution graph. In my read, this data is foundational to many of his arguments, but there's a fundamental flaw in his application of it, which is: why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any sub-group with a filter process) would be meaningfully predictable by or representative of their biology's bimodal distribution, in the first place?

I've noticed that a lot of Damore proponents never actually engage with the questions I ask them. Can you provide answers to the questions I've already asked?

Edit: Acccctually. I'm noticing that this is exhausting for me (wouldn't be surprised if you felt the same) annnnd I don't predict it'll generate all that much worthwhile buuuut I have an idea.

Rather than hash over something someone else said four years ago - what do you think of workshopping something that you'd like to express, that you think would receive a negative reception "by the orthodoxy", ala JD? Because I'm willing to bet my time and energy on my thesis that "tone" is what sunk his essay, and that I can help someone else express themselves in a way that'll receive a much, much better reception.

(I realize that while I might just be betting my time and energy, you'd be likely to be betting much more, but we're rather limited by this medium haha)

[ALittleLight]

I read your comment opposed to Damore as something like "Damore says this distribution of traits exists in the general population, but it doesn't necessarily exist in the subset of Google." Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think that point is true and I think it is the kind of thing where, if Google were considering taking Damore's feedback, they should investigate. Is Google's population of employees noticeably different from the general population? How about the population of people who interview at Google?

I think that the assumption that Google, with 150k (or whatever it was at the time) employees plus candidate employees, roughly approximates population trends is a reasonable starting place for a single author writing up some thoughts. If this were an academic paper we would probably expect the author to consider this at some point. If it's some thoughts the author put together on diversity? Seems like a crazy standard to me.

I'm not sure what questions you've asked that haven't been responded to. I see a couple questions in your parent comments asking whether your take on Damore was nuanced/critical. If that's what you're referring to my answers to those questions are that I feel you badly misrepresent Damore and your commentary on him is short of meaningful.

Regarding your edit - in my view we have a substantive disagreement here, over Damore. I don't see why we would abandon that to discuss other topics.

My position on Damore is that you and others misrepresent Damore in order to gaslight and threaten people who disagree with you. "Unapproved thoughts on diversity? That's an anti-diversity political screed. You are a sexist bigot who will be fired and relentlessly slandered in national media."

By gaslighting I mean that you and others pretend to invite "conversation" but when disagreements happen there is less conversing and more heretic-burning. Damore is a perfect example. Google hosts a diversity class, the class asks for feedback, Damore shares his thoughts on diversity, then he is terminated and renounced in the media, and even here, by you, on Hacker News.

[civilized]

I think RangerScience means better than you assume, but you're not wrong about the broader strokes: fake inviting of conversation followed by vicious Cultural Revolution-style denunciation. I commented on it over here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29610571

[RangerScience]

> something like

Yeah, that's correct. And IMHO, if Damore had presented just that, I would expect the outcome to be different, although still fraught for other reasons. But he didn't present just that.

> questions

You did end up answering them, although in a different chain! And I appreciate it.

> disagreement

I mean, bluntly, I'm pretty much ready to abandon it, although since others are engaging seems like you're good to go without me :)

> conversation

One issue that seems to come up in these situations - not always, and I don't really know one way the other if it came up in Damore's - was recently demonstrated by Dave Chappelle, when he went to his alma mater saying (paraphrased) "let's have a conversation", and then (IMO) very much didn't, even if people said words to each other. So that happens.

> you and others

So... Like. To the extent that I've invited you to a conversation, that we're then having here - do you feel like we're having a conversation, or do you feel like there's more heretic burning?

[joshuamorton]

> I think that the assumption that Google, with 150k (or whatever it was at the time) employees plus candidate employees, roughly approximates population trends is a reasonable starting place for a single author writing up some thoughts. If this were an academic paper we would probably expect the author to consider this at some point. If it's some thoughts the author put together on diversity? Seems like a crazy standard to me.

But we know this to be untrue: Damore's questions come up as a response to the question of "why does Google have an unrepresentatively low number of women" (and from that, the implied "how do we fix that"). To assume that Google's employees match broad population trends is to assume the entire conversation moot. In fact, everyone involved agrees that Google doesn't match general population trends, so if you're having to assume that to justify Damore's takes, something has gone wrong somewhere!

> Google hosts a diversity class, the class asks for feedback, Damore shares his thoughts on diversity

For what its worth, this is a pretty serious misrepresentation of things, and if that were the extent of things Damore wouldn't have been fired. As I understand it, he gave the feedback to HR and nothing happened. He proceeded to post the document in larger and larger discussion groups, until he eventually posted it into a really big group, where it was linked to an even bigger group. That's also a big part of what moves this from "feedback" to "manifesto", its disingenuous to call it "feedback on a diversity class" when you're emailing it to a thousand people, nearly none of whom ever took the class. That's pretty far into thesis nailed to the church door territory.

The other thing that puts it into "screed" territory is that it doesn't have a coherent thesis. Is it about gender diversity? Well a lot of it is, but it also has a significant subtheme about political diversity (and trying to psychoanalyze Google as a "left-biased" company), and has a number of potshots at "the left". Why?

[jbay808]

> why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any sub-group with a filter process) would be meaningfully predictable by or representative of their biology's bimodal distribution, in the first place?

I don't think you would; however you might find you end up with a ratio of both groups that is not 50/50 but rather proportional to the ratio between the areas of both curves that lie above some cutoff.

For a maybe less controversial take, as of 2021 there are far more women than men who do, say, embroidery as a hobby. In that sense "population by hours spent embroidering per year for fun" is two overlapping histograms that skew differently by gender. Big peaks for both groups at zero. However, once we filter our discussion to "people who do embroidery as a hobby", cutting off the majority of both populations (but the supermajority of men), we can't assume that the same pattern holds. The trend might even flip; the average man-who-does-embroidery might do it much more than the average woman-who-does-embroidery, just because they've been so strongly selected for; less committed men never would have picked up that hobby at all.

But we can be pretty sure that the population of men who spend even an hour a year embroidering is much smaller than the population of women who do the same, without making any assumptions that those men who do embroidery have any lesser skill, interest, or dedication.

[civilized]

> why you should expect anyone at Google (or, well, any sub-group with a filter process) would be meaningfully predictable by or representative of their biology's bimodal distribution, in the first place?

This is an important point and would have been my main intellectual critique of Damore as well. Statistics of large populations don't necessarily generalize to small subpopulations. For this reason Damore's arguments, while worthy of consideration, are quite a bit less than conclusive.

At the same time I think Damore's points were basically insightful and likely to have some truth even within Google. In particular, there's a lot about tech that could be more human, and that women would disproportionately excel at. Why don't we do more of that stuff? Not only would we employ more women productively in tech, everybody would be happier with how tech works in society.

One of the most progressive and "woke" women I know at my work said essentially this to me, unprompted. This was her idea of how to make tech better. Damore's idea! (Of course she'd never admit that it was Damore's but...)

[civilized]

It's so deeply misinformed to say that Damore posited insurmountable blockers to groups of people not like him. It is impossible for me to understand how someone can claim to have read the document and this is what they understood it to be saying.

First of all, he stressed that the relevant traits exist in abundance in all groups, as each group has a wide range of people within it. He had a giant graph illustrating this at the outset. He couldn't have been more clear.

Second, he was talking about psychological tendencies and preferences, not a literal inability to do tech work.

[RangerScience]

Yeah, that's fair - it's been awhile since all this went down, so I guess my summary of my own take got hyperbolic over the years :/

[civilized]

You get BIG points for being willing to admit that possibility in my book. We all get things horribly wrong sometimes. Especially with, God, the incredible cultural pressure.

I have problems with how Damore expressed himself too FWIW. But I think he was only trying to break an oppressive silence and start a conversation that was being heavily suppressed.

I would have been happy to give him a strong, balanced critique had I been at Google and had I felt it wouldn't get me fired too.

[civilized]

Yes, I think your characterization of Damore's document is deeply flawed, to an irresponsible degree, and I have no problem telling you that directly. The "insurmountable blockers" thing is particularly ridiculous, as I explain in another comment in this tree [1]. I do believe my comment is an appropriately nuanced critique of a flatly ridiculous position.

I'm glad that you like SSC though and I'm sure we could get along and discuss this rationally and fairly. I did not say that you didn't read the SSC article, only that you should look at it to appreciate the relevance to the current conversation.

All that said, I'm not going to hold back on how poorly I think you've understood what Damore said.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29610370

[RangerScience]

Fosho. Rest of discussion in other tree; for here, just this bit. You said:

> I would highly recommend you read the beginning of the linked SSC article

That definitely reads to me like you saying I didn't read it. Can you take a moment and attempt to understand how that would come across as having that meaning?

[civilized]

That's fair. Sometimes when I want to make a point I just charge forward and don't think about the best way to manage how it will sound. "You didn't read X" to a stranger over the internet is an unfounded cheap shot I would never intentionally take.

[boppo1]

You too. Please run for office.

[boppo1]

Please run for office.

[nine_k]

The problem with the reaction to Damore's paper, to my mind, that instead of people pointing at the paper's shortcomings and trying to refine the approach to see if the idea could make sense if researched with more rigor, they urgently rejected it wholesale because it was irritating to the sensitivities of the modern progress faith. Nobody wanted to be a target of a public scandal in which rational reasoning, or even being objectively right, is not a way to win.

The problem with human societies is that they crave faith, they crave an easy mental model of the world and an easy way to tell "us" from them, but science by construction is anti-faith, it's built of questioning everything.

[jl2718]

If I’m not mistaken, this was an individual contribution to an internal discussion, not at all part of his job. When you say he should seek diverse opinions, is that not exactly what he did in submitting this to a discussion including many diverse opinions?

[RangerScience]

Yeah, I wasn't able to find much on that aspect of the situation. Thing of it was, it very much DID NOT read to me as one "turn" of a discussion, but something attempting to be a solid answer; the conclusion of a discussion, after which no more discussion should happen. IMHO, he said about twice as much as he should have; which is to say, IMHO he should have just asked a bunch of questions ("are we looking at middle and highschool interest rates in STEM when we determine diversity goals?") where instead he both asked and answered questions (MS and HS interest rates in STEM means it's pointless to try to do [all these other things]).

In other words, to the extent that it was true that it was a contribution to an internal discussion, and to the extent that that matters, it had many critical flaws as a contribution to a discussion.

[Wolfenstein98k]

He was asked to contribute his thoughts, and he did.

He backed it up with evidence.

It may be that he didn't use all the evidence available and some supports contrary views - I'd be surprised if this weren't the case - but he was engaging in good faith, expecting someone else to present that counter-argument.

I don't mean this to be disrespectful but it appears the majority of your criticism boils down to tone-policing.

[RangerScience]

> tone policing

No, I get that, and you're not wrong. But...

The more time I spend with people who've been emotionally abused, listening to their experiences, the more I understand how huge a part of abuse is the tone of speech involved in that abuse.

And again, I see that core diversity issue: a lot of us don't start out noticing tone pretty much at all (I definitely didn't!), or with tone having a meaningful impact on our experience of someone else's words, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or doesn't matter, or doesn't have an impact. And the more I notice all that, the happier I am with my words, the better they seem to be, and the more people seem to understand them.

As an example of the same communication with very different tone, so I can talk about it: "Here is what's going on, and here's the evidence that demonstrates it". "Here's what I think, and here's what I saw that led me to think that."

IMHO, the first one has a "tone" of "conclusiveness" (similar to "stop words", from Less Wrong). The only way for me to continue the (notional) conversation is to take an adversarial stance; the "tone" of the sentence is one of concluding the conversation. Contrast with the second one, which as a "tone" of "inclusion"; I'm bringing you along with my experience; and which I find has an inherent effect of inviting people to continue the conversation; the "tone" of the sentence if one of encouraging a continuation of the conversation.

I do think JD was attempting to contribute in good-faith (or, more so than less so; people are complex to begin with). IMHO it was a poor contribution in critical ways, and it's both sad and ironic to me how related those specific failures are to the diversity conversation to which he was attempted to contribute.

[civilized]

> The more time I spend with people who've been emotionally abused, listening to their experiences, the more I understand how huge a part of abuse is the tone of speech involved in that abuse.

Have you asked yourself who was emotionally abused in the Damore affair? Who was misrepresented in a defamatory fashion? Who was publicly denounced and fired?

Frankly, I think it's sociopathic to emphasize kindness so much as a moral principle while being so horrible to the people who fall afoul of a favored ideology. This is the one thing about our current elite that I find the most revolting. Fake, hypocritical promotion of kindness, with immediate and overwhelming viciousness to anyone who dares to disagree with them in the slightest.

[RangerScience]

Okay. Well, first, I'd just ask: in the discussion here, do you think I've been inconsistently applying kindness, or, more directly, being unkind to those who disagree with me?

Second, I really don't understand how this should be applied to my assertion that tone matters. Can you walk me through that? Or, am I mistaken in thinking that you're saying you disagree that tone matters?

[ALittleLight]

I think Damore's memo is an illustration that there is no "conversation" on diversity. You are allowed to not discuss the topic or to have the approved opinion, but, ironically enough, if you share a diverse opinion on diversity, you will be fired and publicly condemned in national media as a sexist bigot.

[tomrod]

More tone deafness, if I read the grandparent right.

[rep_lodsb]

Yes, it was moderately anti-diversity. But many people reacted as though it did say something like "women belong in the kitchen". Okay, it's been some time since I read the document, and there may have been parts that weren't phrased as tactfully as you - or I - would have liked. Well, here's my heretical thoughts:

So what if there are minor differences in brain development that have some statistical effect? It doesn't mean that all members of group X are somehow unsuited for a particular career - let alone deserving of less dignity as human beings - but it could explain why fewer of them choose to pursue it. Different people have different talents and inclinations, and membership in a particular group defined by biological factors could well be correlated. But that is irrelevant when it comes to individuals.

In Nazi Germany, one propaganda poster said "You are nothing, your People (Volk) is everything". So in their ideology, the individual by itself doesn't matter, only as part of the group.

But every one of us is different from each other, and membership in some Group (whether defined by ethnicity, gender or anything else) may be a small part of it, but it does not define who we are.

There does seem to me to be an orthodoxy today. One that claims that any underrepresentation of some group must be the result of systemic discrimination, and that it has to be corrected by whatever means necessary. More and more, it tends to see people not as individuals, but again as representing some particular group, with relations between those groups always defined in terms of oppression and victimhood.

This orthodoxy has become the most dominant force on the political "left", but strangely enough, it is supported by some of the largest corporations as well - corporations that also increasingly control our access to information. Are they really just trying to counteract historical injustices? Will the invisible hand of the market guide us into a better society, once the CEOs are no longer straight white cis-males? Or do they, like so many others, just want to be on top of the power dynamics that they frame every human relationship in?

[clavicat]

If Damore had instead offered his opinion that Google lacked diversity because of white-supremacist patriarchy, Donald Trump, and rapey tech bros, somehow I doubt that you would have conjured this list of excuses to pathologize him for voicing his opinion and provoking a mob to demand that he be deprived of his livelihood. No, you probably would have described the backlash as an atrocity being inflicted on a courageous voice for denouncing social injustice. This is a splendid example of a selective demand for rigor. In order to share an opinion, you apparently have to “do a substantive sociological investigation”—do you think the other parties in the same conversation were performing field studies and submitting their master’s thesis? You blame him for “not starting a discussion”—even though he had written what he did as a contribution to an ongoing discussion. You blame for having any certitude in his own opinion—I’m sure the mob baying for his head just really disliked fanaticism. Oh, he was supposed to recruit co-authors—this is an absurd demand that goes far beyond even what is expected of academic papers, which do have sole authors.

This is how ideologically dominant positions always shore up their hegemony. Every time an enemy of theirs fails to dot every I and cross every T, you can be sure that the regime will magnify their missteps all out of proportion and invent procedures that they failed to follow in order to justify whatever act of savage repression is visited on them.

>much of the core issue of equity is having people with one perspective answering important questions for people with a different perspective.

Again, remind me which “perspective” was calling for the other side to be rendered unemployable?

[f137]

So, you basically say he was wrong to state his opinion openly.

> I really, really wonder what would have happened if he'd sought out diverse co-authors.

I wonder too what would have happened if Jesus sought out diverse co-authors for his teachings.

[SkyMarshal]

> attempting to present his answers as more substantial than the underlying investigation could support (instead of doing a substantive sociological investigation);

This was the main issue I noticed when I read it. It read like a newbie academic making the classic fallacy of assuming the conclusion, then citing only sources that support that conclusion, while ignoring 1) that those sources are not definitive or conclusive, and 2) the body of research and evidence that may disprove it.

It's much easier to disprove an assertion than prove one true. In fact all of science is based around rigorously disproving hypotheses, simply because Process of Elimination is the most robust and reliable way of surfacing new truths while minimizing false positives.

Back to Damore's paper, if you're going to write a critique of something so controversial in society, you can't just cherry-pick sources that agree with you. A better approach would have been, as you observe, to raise questions about some issues and challenge society to a discussion, but without trying to prime or anchor it with pre-conceived conclusions.