Reading the comments in this thread is disheartening. It mostly consists of either false claims of what Damore actually said or pre-conceived interpretations of his memo as being anti-diversity without a single, not a single reference to his memo.
My general impression is that because Damore is a big fat nobody whose career has already been flushed down the toilet by these events, it is a popular discussion to have precisely because it is relatively safe for anyone to give their 2 cents worth and explore how to talk about extremely divisive topics that can be quite dangerous to try to talk about. Kind of like it is popular to mock the Gor books because it is a safe way to express opinions about gender issues where it would not be safe to talk about actual real life situations where society expects women to be submissive and deferential.
So I really don't expect such discussions to be high quality. I think it has merit that it can happen at all, but my feeling is that much of the discussion swirling around the Damore memo is training wheels level discussion.
I think you have it backwards - this thread is full of people making excuses for Damore.
And yes, I've read it. Just because he wrote some sentences that claimed he's in favor of diversity doesn't magically change the content of the rest of the memo.
If he was truly arguing in good faith, he should've stuck to actual, demonstrable examples of issues or problems caused by the existing diversity practices. There was no need to go on long rambling tangents about population statistics that even he acknowledges aren't really relevant to the topic:
> "Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
It's quite strange, but if you read James Damore's memo at face value, you'll find Google and YouTube execs saying essentially the same thing in public:
(Seriously, watch that, and tell me which side is intellectually open and honest, and which side comes across as ideologues.)
> "Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions."
You'll note that most of the memo seems to be implying the opposite.
"Seems to be implying." You are essentially admitting to an ideologically skewed, imputational reading.
"We always ask why we don't see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we
see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not
be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.
"Status is the primary metric that men are judged on4, pushing many men into these higher
paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men
into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and
dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of
work-related deaths."
I pity those poor men, forced into high-paying, high-status, but unsatisfying jobs like programming, management, coal mining, and garbage collection.
