
Fired Google engineer James Damore is giving his first major interviews - rbanffy
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-james-damore-major-interviews-right-wing-2017-8
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zapperdapper
Fascinating. I think this one is going to run and run, and not just within the
techie community.

I read the fateful memo (which has been labelled 'toxic rant' and 'diatribe').
I was discussing it with my partner who is a nurse.

As you probably know - most people who work in nursing are female. Is that
because of 'gender stereotyping' or 'biological differences'? Are women just
naturally drawn to the caring professions?

What I find especially interesting is that this topic is now being discussed
in scenarios where it wouldn't normally be talked about...

As I said...this one will run and run...

~~~
yahna
Or is it because for a very long time men were the doctors and women were the
nurses.

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beaconstudios
Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor and classical liberal. He has a big
following of alt-right nutbags but isn't himself alt-right as far as I'm
aware.

[edit: originally included Stefan Molyneux in my defense but having taken a
look it seems he's started putting out much more alt-right content].

~~~
throwanem
Molyneux is pretty indefensible, yeah - not because he's outside mainstream
opinion, but because he is a severely tendentious reasoner with a nasty habit
of picking call-in guests for the weakness of their arguments, the better to
dominate the conversation and make his own ideas look unassailable. In any
context where he doesn't get to pick his own opponents in debate, I confide
he'd get owned in very short order - which I suspect is why he is so hard to
find in such contexts.

Disagreement with the prevailing orthodoxy is one thing - I'd like to hope
there's no one here who fails to see the value in honorable, substantive
dissent, even from an orthodoxy with which one strongly agrees in general. The
trouble with Molyneux is not that he dissents, but that in doing so he fails
to display either of those meritable traits.

~~~
beaconstudios
very true. He also seems to have been pandering to his newly found audience of
authoritarians too which is an odd position for a proclaimed libertarian. Plus
the old "not an argument" line that he throws around a lot.

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sintaxi
I'm blown away by how quickly these events have been unfolding. I wonder if
the mainstream media got tuned away for these interviews in favour of Dr.
Peterson and Stefan Molyneux. Is this an indication the mainstream media is no
longer mainstream or it the topic that makes this an anomaly?

~~~
zapperdapper
Having seen some of the media reaction I'm not surprised! The acidity of the
reaction to the memo has been quite breath-taking.

Guardian have a piece I was reading this morning saying is was a 'sexist
diatribe against women in tech'. Maybe I am reading the wrong memo?

~~~
collyw
It was quite pathetic the way they showed screen shots of the outrage on
twitter, while failing to provide any links to the source.

My opinion of Guardian went down quite a bit yesterday. They are frequently
pushing an agenda, but their reporting of this was pretty dishonest (I had
read the original before I read the Guardians interpretation).

~~~
zapperdapper
Ah, so it wasn't just me who thought that. My opinion of them went down a few
notches too...

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averagewall
I think the fundamental problem is this. I've seen it happening for decades:

Everyone sensible knows there are group differences between sexes.

Most humans are bad at distinguishing group differences from individual
differences.

If people are widely aware of the group differences, they'll do stereotyping
and apply wrong logic to mistreat people. Or even right logic to make the best
guess in the absence of other information, which turns out to be consistently
discriminatory and harmful.

So we shouldn't say much publicly about the group differences. Keep it quiet
among intelligent people for the public safety.

I don't like that at all, but that's how I think the popular lefty opinion
works.

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unityByFreedom
> So we shouldn't say much publicly about the group differences. Keep it quiet
> among intelligent people for the public safety.

That's not the point. The point is he is chalking up gender employment ratios
to biology. Meanwhile, there are many socialization factors he is completely
ignoring.

This is an ancient debate, nature vs. nurture, the oldest in psychology. It's
been going on for centuries, and perhaps millenia, not just decades.

And, the irony is, that by arguing the cause is biology, he may be adding an
additional socialization factor. Women may see this guy speaking out and
decide not to work at Google because of it. That's socialization, not
biological.

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Chris2048
> Women may see this guy speaking out and decide not to work at Google

Or non leftist women feel they _can_ work there. Or are all women leftist?

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Mz
Some women don't even know what _leftist_ means.

(Holds up hand.)

~~~
Chris2048
"having or relating to left-wing political views.", distinct to liberal or
democrat.

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fmitchell0
Can someone help me understand how we've equivocated factually wrong things
with dissenting opinion?

If I said all human beings were born with 8 fingers and 6 toes and am
dismissed from my biology class for it, was it because I had a dissenting
opinion?

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beaconstudios
what factually wrong statements did James Damore make?

[edit] I'm genuinely asking, I've not seen a source for the original memo so
all I've heard is second-hand info.

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throwanem
He conflated group and individual variability, for one thing. It's a common
mistake on all sides of the debate, and not by any means limited to this
context; indeed, one of the more pernicious legacies of the Progressive Era's
early attempts at social science and engineering is the mistaken idea that
statistical inferences about whatever group convey information about the
individual human being sitting across a table from you.

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abnry
If you read his essay he absolutely did not conflate group and individual
variability.

~~~
throwanem
I'll put my hand up to not having read the whole thing; this is a fairly busy
week for me, and I don't expect to find the time soon. That's totally on me;
on the other hand, I'm getting the basis of my prior statement via Frederik
deBoer, whom I've found to be very meticulous in such matters, and so I've
been willing to assume its accuracy despite unfamiliarity with the primary
source.

It sounds like you have read the whole thing, though. Would you mind calling
out some relevant quotes, so that I can get a better sense of his points on
the subject, and retract my earlier statement should it prove unfactual?
Thanks!

~~~
Smutte
Your previous comment is a good example of the larger issue at hand. Your
comment, the Google incident but honestly current western society as a whole.

It is actually quite interesting to try to understand... What brings a person
to make a statement such as yours, without having read the material in
question..? Would the same person (you) also comment on how much he/she likes
or dislikes food before having tried it? It seems to me this is not about
having a "busy week" but a completely different view of truth, what is "right"
and honestly when to talk and when to listen.

I dont mean to continue bashing you, but your comment was such a clear and
ironic example/display of what I think is a very big challenge for western
society these days.

~~~
throwanem
> What brings a person to make a statement such as yours, without having read
> the material in question

Can't speak for any other person or any other case. But, here, I relied on a
secondary source who has built a reputation with me for veracity even on
contentious topics such as these, despite that he and I disagree on just about
every prior in the world when it comes to matters of this sort. Unfortunately,
he has disappointed me here, and I've thus made a factual error in an earlier
comment which I have since acknowledged in a sibling thread to this one.

I'm not sure what effect that's likely to have on the whole larger point about
Western society that you're trying to draw here. Seems like a lot of stew from
one very small oyster, especially considering you're coming with this at a gay
man who spent an entire day's worth of HN participation, a few months back,
arguing that gay marriage is a bad idea both for the individuals involved and
for the state. Came out net karma positive on it, too, which I found
surprising. But I think there's a great deal in my prior commentary here that
would surprise you, had you but bothered to look before you went running off
on whatever this tangent is about how I'm an example of everything that's
wrong with Western society, or I'm privileging my individual opinion of how
things must be over the facts of the matter, or whatever.

If you want to talk about irony, how about the irony that inheres in making
exactly the same mistake against which you inveigh when you see me make it,
having incidentally failed to notice that, by the time you got around to
trying to set me up as some kind of example of a failure in society as a
whole, I'd already seen the error called out as such, requested substantiation
of the counterclaim, received same, and clearly recognized that I'd erred?
That seems pretty ironic to me!

~~~
Smutte
It seems you interpreted my comment as a critique aimed at you as an
individual and I can understand why you did that. However it was certainly not
my goal and Im sorry if you felt attacked. I tried to be clear both that your
comment (i.e. not you as an individual) was a good example and I also finished
my post by saying that I didnt mean to continue bashing you (as an
individual). I wrote that because I actually had read your other comments.
That was why I added the last sentence.

I think this is getting a bit OT. Again, sorry if you felt personally
attacked. That was not what I was after. If you take a step back from the
posts and just read them for what they are... maybe you could see that it is a
pretty good example of the drama we see around this. The Google VP of
Diversity made (imho) quite a similar comment in her statement as you did. She
did, however, not detract it as far as I know.

~~~
throwanem
I mean I interpreted the comment as individual critique because that was how
you wrote it. If you didn't intend it as personal criticism, then you have a
serious problem with your style.

Would you like to separate the point you're trying to make from the _ad
hominem_ with which you first sought to make it, and try again? Perhaps you
have something of substantial merit to say on this point, and perhaps you do
not. Either way, conflating it with some kind of sideswipe at what you imagine
to be the person of your interlocutor does not help you make your case -
especially when, as I suspect may be true here, you're trying to argue in
defense of intellectual honesty. What do you imagine it helping, to make such
an argument in so flawed a fashion as this?

~~~
Smutte
The actual mistake that you yourself realized that you made is, imho, a good
example of what is happening in this drama.

James gets accused of something that he really didnt write and people refer to
things that are grossly misinterpreted or just plain wrong and clearly not in
the actual document (in more general terms the characterizations could be
described as lies or misrepresentations of the truth as per my original
comment). Just as your attempt to explain why ge got attacked.

A clear difference between your comment and many in this drama is that you
retracted your statement and the VP of Google didnt (afaik) and that is good
on you! But I never talked about you as an individual in the first place so
thats kind of irrelevant to my point. You can call it "unfair" of me to single
out your first comment and not your retraction, but again my point wasnt to
judge you as an individual. It was to show how that specific comment (partly
out of context) was a good example of what is going on.

~~~
throwanem
"Unfair" is your word, not mine. The personal attack doesn't bother me - I've
been called a paid FSB agent in the past and that was actually pretty
hilarious, I'm not about to get out of sorts over something this picayune.
What annoys me is the fact that it spoils your argument - of which you're
still doing a disappointingly poor job in support.

If you want to say that a you think a lot of people have taken quotes
tendentiously out of context, or just deliberately misrepresented Damore's
statements outright, in order to support ideologically driven and tendentious
counterclaims, then say so. I'm not about to disagree with you on that - in my
judgment, one of the reasons our society is so badly broken these last few
decades, and just barely limping along in a state where one good solid crisis
could well bring it down, is because lies have gained such ubiquitous and
unassailable primacy over truth.

How do you think it helps you make an argument like that, to tie it to a
failing comparison between the dissimilar actions of a pair of people
approaching the issue from totally disjoint perspectives and with totally
dissimilar intents? More to the point, what effect do you think that has on
everyone else who tries to make arguments similar to yours, but with the good
sense to base them more firmly than you have done here?

I think you may not be aware of, or may not take seriously enough, that this
is a situation where, because we're arguing against a strongly held and
ideologically driven mainstream opinion, we each have to expect to be taken as
_pars pro toto_ by people who aren't interested in reasoned discussion toward
joint identification of the most useful course of action to follow - but
rather in making us out to be the most absurdly overblown, unserious, and
hateful assholes they possibly can, the better to render us mute and unable to
participate in public discourse. That's why "alt-right" means "Nazi" now.

When you make sloppy, shitty arguments like this, calling out personalities
instead of parsing ideas and basing your statements on ad hom instead of
anything that merits being taken seriously, you make life a whole lot easier
for people who would like to define "we should treat people as individuals" as
"secretly hates women and wishes he could still own slaves".

If you're going to continue to participate publicly in this kind of argument,
from this direction, then you need to hold yourself to the highest of
standards, because believe me, there are plenty of people out there who will
use any deviation therefrom to paint you as every kind of monster in the
world. If you can't or don't care to do that, then the best thing you can do
to help advance your cause is to stop participating in public at all, because
doing it as poorly as you are here hands a weapon to those who have no higher
goal than to make us all regret the temerity which led us to question the
prevailing orthodoxy. That weapon doesn't just work on you. It works on all of
us. When you do this, you make that much higher the bar we all have to clear
just to get a fair hearing in public, and for no good reason in the world. You
should stop.

~~~
Smutte
Last try.

Someone asked whats up with this James guy.

You answered with something that was completely false and even clearly
contrary to what was written.

(You admitted to this.)

I pointed out that your original misrepresentation was similar to what others
do in this very drama. E.g. the statement from Google VP of Diversity
attacking James. I also said I didnt mean to bash you any more (since you
admitted), BUT that your original comment was an interesting
example/illustration of something bigger.

You obviously took offense.

I tried to explain that I was talking about the comment in general and not you
as an individual. I also said Im sorry if I offended you. But the fact remains
that your comment was a misrepresentation of the memo that was similar to e.g.
how the VP misrepresented it. Although you actually did it more explicitly
than her.

If you cant extract yourself as an individual from this observation you will
probably never get it. If you think Im an idiot, thats ok.

~~~
throwanem
Man, seriously? Just stop. You're helping nothing here.

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blinkingled
The only sane response to this crap is silence. Stop legitimizing it by
acknowledging its existence.

~~~
throwanem
Kill an idea by ignoring it? Has that ever worked?

~~~
blinkingled
If someone stood up with a sign that said "all people named throwanem, their
ancestors and descendants are stupid and deserve to be lobotomized" \- will
you diligently argue with that person every time you see them? I would not - I
would ignore it in an instant based on its lack of logic and utility.

Shit exists, insanity exits, people can and will say what they want - doesn't
mean every thing that's said needs to be addressed without regard to anything
else.

~~~
throwanem
Well, I don't know of anyone actually so named, so there's that. I also don't
always accept an interlocutor's priors when they seem unlikely to support
productive discussion, and argument from absurdity is one of those situations.

You seem strongly convinced that there is nothing more to be said beyond your
own apparently firmly held view on this subject, and I respect that. However,
it appears this view is far from ubiquitous. Does misrepresenting and
insulting those who do not share it seem more likely to convince them than
ignoring them does?

~~~
blinkingled
> it appears this view is far from ubiquitous.

So for you, validity of views has corelation with how many people hold it? I
guess we can call that absurdity and stop?

~~~
throwanem
I don't believe I have said anything of the sort. But if it's a matter of
import to you that your view come to hold sway among those who do not
currently subscribe to it, I should think you'd have some interest in finding
effective ways to convince them. I'm not sure the methods you seem to be
employing here satisfy that criterion.

