Google, Indoctrination and James Damore


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I agree that setting up a suggestions for improvement program and then firing somebody who shares something to it is bad (though obviously there are limits, Diversity is one of Google's core values), but I still think it was a poor decision for Damore to post it in a semi-public setting.  Published may not have been the best choice of words, but the memo was sent to a large number of people at google.  It doesn't take too much knowledge of current events to know that there was a high possibility of this memo offending somebody, and if you offend somebody you can lose your job.  Most articles haven't mentioned it but this guy worked on Google Plus, which is a horrible product so it's not clear to me that he was just fired for writing this memo.

 

He had shared his thoughts with other employees and didn't have any problems until he shared it with a wider forum. As I said, the problem was that he's publicly criticizing a department whose job it is to create policies, Google is public about its support of diversity. 

 

I don't think anybody expects Google to be perfectly gender balanced in the near future, but they're one of the world's biggest companies and likely to be around for decades if not centuries so it's not an unreasonable goal for them to have.

 

I agree that people exaggerated the contents of the memo.

 

I don't know anything about the secret diversity meetings he had to go to.  But you need to work at fitting in socially at a company, usually this is harder for people who aren't white males than those who are.

 

Have you looked at what the people at Google wrote against the memo?  They cited science as well.  As far as I know, there aren't many salient differences between men and women's cognitive abilities (Rand would agree with me here).  There is a difference in their expressed interests, but that could change over time.  Maybe women seek more work life balance then men because they believe that all the jobs where you work long hours are discriminatory towards women.

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Also, while I'm a huge fan of science, I don't think it's immoral for a company to follow policies that contradicts science.  Can you imagine what would happen if somebody at Exxon sent out a memo saying the company should change it's energy policies because of global warming?   They'd be fired.

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20 minutes ago, RobinReborn said:

Also, the first programmer was a woman.  The first person to write a compiler was a woman.  Computer used to be an occupation mainly performed by women.  Women used to have more representation in CS then they do now.

And Adelle Goldstein one one of the first programmers in the electronic era.  Programming.  The flight from Ada to Adelle.  Ada August in effect wrote the first assembly language for  Babbage's Analytic Engine.   Behold the world's first programming  manual  ---  https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html

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3 hours ago, RobinReborn said:

I agree that people exaggerated the contents of the memo.

RR,

That's a hell of a euphemism for distort and lie about.

:) 

A lie is a lie is a lie, not an exaggeration.

3 hours ago, RobinReborn said:

Have you looked at what the people at Google wrote against the memo?

You mean these people?

Internal Messages Show Some Googlers Supported Fired Engineer’s Manifesto

This is from Wired, which tilts left. So if they said, "some Googlers," you can rest assured they meant "many," especially as most who agree will not want to put their jobs at risk speaking out. And, in addition to Wired's own bias filter, they know that. Do a Google search on this issue if you are interested. You will see that Google is in a pickle over it, even at many left-wing sites.

3 hours ago, RobinReborn said:

They cited science as well.  As far as I know, there aren't many salient differences between men and women's cognitive abilities...

I don't want to argue against feminist political talking points, but there are temperamental differences due to higher degrees of oxytocin in women and lower degrees of testosterone. Menstruation cycles. Other hormones. Even average size. And so on. The modern politically correct view denies or ignores these things. To pretend that they would not affect most women's preferences in their interests is silly to me, but whatever. 

Facts are facts, though. And feminists don't like gender-based facts. They prefer their myths and blame the patriarchy because women singers can't sing the bass line at the correct low pitch. Feminism is basically the left's version of fundamentalist religion denying evolution. It even was when Rand was alive. When asked why she was not a feminist, she responded it was because she was a male chauvinist. :) 

As to all the examples of women coders, fine. Bring it on. The more the merrier. In fact, that's exactly what Damore was saying. He wanted more women in tech. (You did read the memo, right?)

But think about this contradiction. Either you believe Google is a dirty rotten company shot through and through with evil dominating males, or you believe, as you said:

3 hours ago, RobinReborn said:

Diversity is one of Google's core values...

Which is it? Male domination or diversity at Google? You can't have both at the same time as the reason for the same thing.

And it's cheating to use one for one item on your agenda and another for a different item. For instance, it's awfully convenient to go ballistic against the evil Google patriarchy to explain the male to female imbalance in the Google tech divisions, then turn right around and say Google's commitment to diversity is the reason they should crucify the guy who is looking outside the box for a different explanation.

I prefer my own explanation. Goiogle's employees are acting (in general) as normal human beings and Google management is sucking up to political power, except it bet on the wrong horse in the presidential campaign and put too many people from the losing side in its company in anticipation of victory. Now it's stuck with them. 

Don't think Google can't wither away. It can. This happens all the time to giant companies that make bad decisions. And don't think the upper management doesn't know they have a huuuuuuuuuge problem right now.

Michael

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If you are big and can't seem to win in the war of ideas, when even peaceful assembly is a threat to you, thugs can always help out.

From Mercury News:

“March on Google” protest in Mountain View postponed

This protest is about Damore, but also about Google skewing search results to hide conservative sites and demonetizing them based on their political ideology.

From the article:

Quote

A protest planned for Saturday at Google in Mountain View has been postponed, according to a blog post by organizers.

The “Peaceful March on Google” has been postponed “due to credible Alt Left terrorist threats for the safety of our citizen participants,” the group wrote in a blog post dated Wednesday. The group is protesting against the search giant’s firing of engineer James Damore over a memo claiming a biological basis for the gender gap in tech.

In addition to the Mountain View campus, there were protests planned at Google offices in eight other cities, including New York City, Washington D.C., Boston, Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Seattle, according to the blog post.

The group hopes to hold its protest in a few weeks, according to the blog post.

A baseball bat or a gun is not a syllogism, that's for sure.

The thing is, you can shut people up with threats of violence, but that does not convince them of anything except you do not want them to speak. And any argument you may make while they are under threat will fall on deaf ears.

What's worse, when the beneficiary of the thugs' threats (Google in this case) keeps nice and quiet about the thuggery, that can cause an awful lot of resentment in the intimidated folks that builds like steam in a pressure cooker on a lit stove.

Michael

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