[acdha]

> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special.

He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.

If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.

(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)

1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...

[tristor]

>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified

He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that.

> but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to.

That is also not true. My understanding is the memo was a report in response to a request from a committee he was part of and wasn't intended to be more widespread. It was leaked inside Google and then outside Google and then people demonized him and he got fired. That's pretty much the high-level set of events. He definitely did not write this after being explicitly told not to, especially "repeatedly" per basically every piece of evidence about the entire kerfuffle.

I'm not a Damore apologist either, but like the sibling it really pisses me off when I see someone just straight up strawmanning or lying about what someone else did to smear them. The man was already blackballed from the entire tech industry and had to leave the country after being fired, mostly for saying factually true statements that are controversial because of the color he (and others) added to them. Isn't that enough? Do you have to lie about what he said, when it was published publicly and anyone can read it for themselves?

[jeffbee]

> The memo was published unredacted.

As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.

> That's pretty much the high-level set of events.

The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

[tristor]

> As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.

Cool story. Here's a rational basis, a link to the unredacted memo that was leaked to Gizmodo and published online, confirmed to be legitimate by James Damore: https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity...

> The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.

What part, specifically? The part where he's living outside the US (in Luxembourg per an article linked in another comment in this larger thread)? The part about him being fired from Google? The part about him being blackballed in the tech industry?

Seriously, the dude is as cancelled as it is possible to get, what more do you want? Argue against his actual statements, if you choose to do so, but don't be a blatant liar. This is the Internet, the Internet is forever, anybody can look this stuff up.

[jeffbee]

A guy leaks a doc to Gizmodo, same guy authenticates it, and that works for you?

[tristor]

Damore is not the one that leaked the doc to Gizmodo, as far as I am aware. The controversy that ultimately lead to him being fired, cancelled, blackballed, and literally leaving the country were directly a result of the internal memo intended for an internal audience becoming public. It would seem the height of stupidity for him to leak the memo himself. He confirmed its authenticity because he was given the opportunity to provide a public response to the comments people had made on it, which is posted at the end of the version I linked.

What's your claim here? That the published memo is fake? That Damore didn't write the things he said that he wrote, and that he suffered serious consequences for having written?

Like what's your play?

[MoneyMeMoneyNow]

What? The outrage was caused by the leaked memo. If it were fake...why would he have gotten fired to begin with? You seem to be intimately aware with the 'real' memo, care to link some evidence to what was in it? Person who replied to you is consistent with my memory of the events at the time.

[llm_nerd]

Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but-

"that women were innately less qualified"

He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.

His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.

NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.

Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.

You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.

I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.

[acdha]

The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes.

Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.

When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.

That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!

[tristor]

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this comment. This is a substantive rebuttal that doesn't make any claims of what he said that are untrue, and I pretty much consider it also a response to my sibling comment in reply to you. I also agree with pretty much everything you said here.