[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?

[ALittleLight]

"Heretic burning" is, obviously, pretty hyperbolic. Nobody is actually being burnt. But, people's (i.e. Damore's) reputations are getting damaged. Other readers have reinforced for them the fact that if you question diversity orthodoxy you will be vilified and fired. I very much think your comments are in that vein - you started with explaining that Damore's memo "was a moderately anti-diversity screed".

Damore's memo was not an anti-diversity screed and I don't believe any reasonable reader could reach that conclusion. As such, I view your comments not as participating in conversation but as a warning light to passersby that they will suffer enduring reputational damage should they express the wrong opinions - a reminder that even if your positions are evidence based, measured, and appropriately expressed you will still face the destruction of your career and reputation for expressing those ideas.

[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?

[ALittleLight]

I don't know why you are saying "everyone involved agrees that Google doesn't match broad population trends". Are the men at Google taller than the women at Google? Google employees are probably unusual in variables that relate to their work with computers, but it's not at all obvious that they would be unusual on other traits, like height, for example, or assertiveness, cooperativeness, etc.

Regarding Damore sharing his memo - he shared it in places where the topic was being discussed. He wasn't mailing this to all workers, but posting it in groups that were discussing diversity and asking for feedback. If Damore's memo had reached different conclusions - like say that Google had fewer women because of sexism in education and implicit biases among hiring committees, and he had shared it in the same places, would he have been fired? I think we both know the answer to that.

[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.

[wussboy]

Thank you to both of you for the humility shown in this discussion.

[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.

[civilized]

This concept is hilarious to me, but thank you, I will keep it in mind :)

[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.