
Thought Police - jerrymiller
http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/08/09/ThoughtPolice.html
======
avs733
Whenever possible I rely on folks who are better writers than me to express
ideas I agree with. This is one of those cases. From a journalist I respect:

"k, let's nip this in the bud right now: James Damore is not a whistleblower,
just as any other sniveling white dudes crying about the presence of people of
color and/or women at their workplace are also not whistleblowers.

Having personal biases and misogynistic views doesn't mean Damore was exposing
institution-wide crimes. What Damore posted essentially boils down to an
argument over management styles. Now, he went about this in the dumbest, most
sensationalist way possible because he circulated a fucking memo about it and
it got posted everywhere. I imagine any company in the world would probably be
pretty cheesed off about an employee doing that.

Now, there are institutional crimes at play here, but Damore didn't expose
them. For example, Google is currently battling a wage discrimination
investigation by the US Department of Labor, which has found that Google
routinely pays women less than men in comparable roles. That's a serious
issue, not the fact that women are working at the company in the first place.

What's funny about all of this is most of the people (read: white men)
complaining about Damore's firing also defend companies' rights to fire
employees at will. If they were really concerned about protecting employees'
ability to internally dissent without jeopardizing their job, they would
strongly support unions and the right to collectively bargain, but they're
been silent on those issues. Why? Because this isn't really about protecting
workers or "whistleblowers." This is about a group of pissed off white dudes
fighting for the rights of other pissed off white dudes to bitch about
diversity and bully and intimidate their co-workers who are people of color
and/or women. "

~~~
xiaoma
If you're using phrases like "sniveling white dudes", you're part of the
problem.

~~~
avs733
naming behavior what it is is the problem?

~~~
slindz
Maybe, on average, women don't prefer tech as often? \- Grab the pitchforks!

Snivelling white dudes. \- Let's call a spade a spade...

~~~
avs733
you mean a group of people socialized away from something from the day they
are born are socialized away from it?

~~~
slindz
The memo's main point was that it would make sense to focus on diversity
efforts closer to the day people are born instead of desperately filling
quotas.

He was interested in exploring effective long term diversity instead of the
kind a company could point to in a lawsuit as quickly as possible.

But it's much easier to label someone as snivelling and call it a day (also
eluded to in the memo - in the title).

------
rbanffy
It's... more complicated than that. Had Edward used the proper internal
channels, his bad ideas would have reached the people in charge of policies
and he'd have a chance to debate them and be proven wrong. When proved wrong,
he'd adjust his mental models of the world in accordance with what he learned.

It's entirely possible this happened and he just didn't change his mind.

Unfortunately, Edward decided to try to start a mutiny and share his dissent
with the whole company, alienating and insulting a significant part of its
workforce, hoping a majority would side with him. Some asked to be removed
from all projects Edward took part in, others wanted to punch him in the face.
The result, unfortunately for Edward, was that it was very hard for him to
stay at the company because very few people wanted to work with him.

While I agree his firing is a rather unfortunate consequence of all this, and
that it'd have been much better had Edward changed his mind in accordance to
the current understanding of how height relates to anxiety about escalator
operations instead of publicly attacking company policies. Unfortunately,
that's not how Edward proceeded.

~~~
rednerrus
Isn't working with people you disagree with part of corporate life? Do you
think there are no conservative people at your company who have to deal with
the incessant anti-conservative tech culture? I assume that occasionally they
want to punch us in our faces. They show up for work and get their jobs done.

The problem with enforcing these policies when we agree with them is we have
to enforce them when we don't agree with them.

~~~
richmarr
> _...incessant anti-conservative tech culture_

Not sure I'd silo this as a tech culture thing. Education has been shown to
negatively correlate with conservatism so it'd be reasonable to expect to see
low numbers of conservatives in any field with higher educational barriers.

[http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-
ideological-g...](http://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-
gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/)

~~~
devnull791101
except in UK, where the poor and uneducated are stereotypically
labour/democrat supporters, wealthy educated types are tory/conservative.

~~~
Edmond
That use to be true in the US too and in some ways still is...but the US also
has the race issue which tends to further complicate everything. Working class
whites use to be democrats for economic reasons (labor) while still being
socially conservative, now they're almost entirely republican and mostly it
seems for social (really, ethnic) reasons.

In the US republican affiliation is (or used to be) actually more closely tied
with college education and higher income and that is the "fiscal conservatism"
(basically lower taxes). Of course higher education levels and income also
correlate quite closely with ethnicity and whites are mostly republicans....

Basically the political divisions have become quite ethnically polarized so
the usual correlation between actual socio-economic interest and party
affiliation don't hold the way one would expect.

------
nicolashahn
The author left out the part where the large tech blog takes Edward's words
and unabashedly misrepresents them, distorting "ERUs policy of giving
preference to short people is discriminatory and harmful to the company" to "I
think short people are inferior to tall people" in order to create outrage
where there otherwise wouldn't have been and advance their own agenda.

------
notacoward
Ah, argument by false analogy. Always a good way to avoid an constructive
discussion, as any inconvenient counter-argument can be dropped into the gap
between the analogy and its referent at the author's sole discretion. Not
going to spend more than a few minutes playing that game.

The problem is that Damore did far more than our elevator operator. He didn't
stop at claiming there were innate differences. He assumed that they could
justify representational differences a full degree of magnitude greater than
those innate differences could possibly account for. He whined about being
silenced, in a memo seen by most of the company. He poisoned the well many
times, accusing anyone who might (even hypothetically) disagree with him of
"generally rejecting science" and "virtue signaling" and being like Communist
dictators. He rejected current approaches because their effectiveness isn't
absolutely 100% proven, then proposed alternatives that are even less proven
(and indeed sometimes proven _not_ to work). It was a veritable parade of
(pseudo-)intellectual dishonesty, which the OP continues from its derogatory
title to its cowardly coda.

A company that fires people for dishonesty isn't dying. It's smart.

------
jaclaz
Sometimes I feel good about not being short and not in the escalator business.

Very interesting article/point of view.

“Monsieur l’Abbé, je déteste ce que vous écrivez, mais je donnerais ma vie
pour que vous puissiez continuer à écrire”

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-
say/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/)

------
shakkhar
Why is this flagged?

------
mcphage
> The people and companies in this posting are fictional. Any resemblance to
> any real individuals or companies is coincidental. The events described
> herein are solely about the fictional individuals and entities, and should
> not be interpreted in any other context.

Honestly I found this to be the most telling line in the whole article. Why
include it? As readers, we're under no obligation to pretend to be so stupid
we can't see through such a transparent falsehood.

Maybe that's part of the problem with the larger conversation as well. Pro-
manifesto articles usually lead with "look, here's all the places in the
manifesto where the author wrote that they support diversity"—does that mean
that, as readers, we need to accept those statements uncritically, ignoring
everything that it includes rejecting diversity?

There _are_ people out there who feel that if they preface their statements
with "No offense, but ...", they are thereby absolved of any responsibility to
not _be_ offensive. That's not how communication does (or should) work,
however.

