Talk:James Damore/Archive1

This is an archive page, last updated 10 March 2021. Please do not make edits to this page.

Archives for this talk page:  , (new)(back)

Should change this article's title to James Damore

It's virtually impossible to separate the man and his memo at this point. For that matter, the memo itself is a brief footnote in the long history of Damore's goofy actions since then. James Earl Cash (talk) 17:15, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

It is not impossible. Damore is not a public figure. He is known to have been diagnosed with autism. I would stick to the essay and leave the man out as much as possible.Ariel31459 (talk) 22:51, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

He certainly made quite an impression with the memo and is now suing Google, not to mention his growing popularity with the alt-right. He might not be well known in the larger media, but he's definitely relevant enough per the alt-right, feminism, and things like that. I don't think his autism excuses any of his actions either. James Earl Cash (talk) 04:23, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

His autism isn't relevant. I don't think we should mention his autism since that's personal information with a heavy load, and it'll be wise to tread very cautiously mentioning it. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 20:50, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

You must be joking. Damore has spoken at length about the difficulties he has had because of his autism. Insensitivity to other people's gender or racial concerns is relevant because thoughtless editing has made it relevant. What we really should do is talk only about the article and the incoherent media response to it, and leave Damore out of it. He is not a public person. Ariel31459 (talk) 23:10, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

He's notorious enough now. It's like giving Milo a pass. That man's not exactly popular either, but he's well known enough to make an article and criticize him for every dirty thing he's done, not even getting into Gamergate.

re: autism, I don't think that matters. He's doubled down on his statements well past any gender or race confusion and made this memo the reason he's famous, going on the likes of Fox News and PragerU, making Twitter statements parroting MRA bullshit talking about how women have more sexual capital than men. He lied about having a PhD on his LinkedIn page and only removed it when the whole scandal erupted. I think we can all agree there's something off about Stefan Molyneux as well, but that doesn't excuse anything he's said or done. It'd be tempting to call hardcore conservative women like Tomi Lahren self-loathing given the things they've done and what they've said, especially when Tomi was fired for daring to speak up for herself and got harassed by a ton of Trump trolls for whatever dumb reason and still defends every batshit point of the modern right, but again, not an excuse. It's disingenuous to present a "balanced, unobjective" view of this memo too. You are essentially saying that people should presume he's not intentionally doing harm. James Earl Cash (talk) 05:54, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

"autism, I don't think that matters." That is just adorable.Ariel31459 (talk) 14:10, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

It doesn't matter; I agree. Being autistic doesn't excuse being a bigot. Being autistic doesn't mean you get to avoid accountability for your statements. It doesn't mean you're incapable of making decisions, and by treating autistic people otherwise you are infantilizing them. And a huge number of autistic activists who have never written the sort of bigoted garbage Damore wrote would be very upset at you suggesting a link. Cat A. Lonia (talk) 03:00, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

Yup, that's the gist of it. It's also incredibly offensive to autistic people if Ariel has his way. Many autistic people would completely disagree with Damore, and Damore's characterization of autistic people is an insulting caricature in and of itself. James Earl Cash (talk) 02:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

You are essentially proposing that someone like Milo deserves a pass if his stories where he takes pride in being raped by priests were true and now advocates the same abuse that was done to him. No, his autism doesn't matter and certainly doesn't excuse anything he's done or said. James Earl Cash (talk) 17:31, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

What you are proposing is essentially incoherent. Milo Yiannopoulos has nothing to do with this discussion. Are you triggered by anything that you find disagreeable?. Do you imagine you are authorized to issue faux-pas passes? That's so sweet.Ariel31459 (talk) 02:43, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

It's called an analogy. Obviously there can be something used to "explain" away why he does and says what he does, it's no excuse. Milo Yiannopoulous might have been preyed upon by pedophile priests and become so massively screwed up that he would become the kind of person he is today. It's still no excuse for the things he's done, both in the capacity of how evil they are as well that it would be damning to those who have suffered sexual abuse and didn't end up like him. Same with Damore and his autism. There is no excuse for him slandering people and using his condition as something to hide behind. James Earl Cash (talk) 02:15, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

It is also called (by me) incoherent. You explain in terms of "excuses." Nobody requires or needs your acceptance. I have no idea if Damore has slandered anyone, much less libeled them. Why should anyone assume such a thing? Ariel31459 (talk) 02:33, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Ahem. You might want to acquaint yourself with the subject of this article in question then, if you're still confused about such issues. And I'm obviously not using slander in the legal sense. I'm using it in the general sense, and in this specific case, as a metaphor.

The point is, his autism is absolutely 100% irrelevant. It has nothing to do with his wrongful actions or his extremely sketchy conclusions in his shoddy mrmo. The only place his autism has in this topic is as an excuse to try and defend him on some bad argument of special pleading which is extraordinarily offensive on it's own as it smears autistic people by extension, but when it comes to this particular discussion at hand? That's a whole other can of worms. James Earl Cash (talk) 04:22, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

There is no point in dealing with people who have little or no knowledge about autism, or for that matter, common English.Ariel31459 (talk) 16:31, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

One of my partners has been professionally diagnosed with autism. You don't know anything about it. It's not something that makes you unable to decide between right and wrong, and saying it is is an insult to people who have it. Cat A. Lonia (talk) 08:19, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

"Some of my best friends..." eh? Sure pal, sure.. this was never a question about "right and wrong" but a matter of scientific opinion, and is better left to editors who can tell the difference. Ariel31459 (talk) 14:32, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

He's a white supremacist !!!

From the section The Media: "Slate even asserted that Damore aligns with "white supremacists",ref, since while the memo did not explicitly endorse racism, it has pushed against minority outreach groups and labeled them as race discrimination. The unsavory conclusion is that when the memo was saying "stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races", it meant those programs and classes."

What the heck do that sentences mean?

I changed it with:

"Slate even asserted that Damore aligns with "white supremacists", although the memo did no comparison whatever about races, neither claimed whites are superior. In fact, the memo pushes against race discrimination, asking to "stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races". --McLaghing (talk) 15:48, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

This is white-washing. The last sentence is precisely why it's racism, but the way it's written is misleading to the reader and is a complaint, a well-known MRA tactic, filed under the perceived reverse discrimination and reverse racism. Earlier in the memo, he goes as far to say that women's programs to get more women in tech industry is like getting more women into homeless, death, prison, school drop-out. That's his entire reasoning, and it's horrendous and was a red flag. According to the slate Damore took a stance that aligns plainly with MRA.

The Google guy also complains about “exclusory programs” that allow women and people of underrepresented racial groups to share skills and experiences. These constitute "discriminatory practices," he writes, and leave "swaths of men without support." Women-only networking groups have been some of the most visible targets of lawsuits from MRAs, who claim that such organizations are engaging in "reverse sexism."

And here's Slate's reasoning on race:

MRAs are undesirable company, for sure, but the Google guy’s memo aligns him with an even more despicable crowd: white supremacists. In the Google document, the author tosses in criticisms of programs that support people of "a certain race" and dismissals of calls for racial diversity. If programs designed to support women are bogus because women are naturally inclined to shun stressful jobs and analytical work, what's wrong with programs designed to support people of color? The author doesn’t attempt to explain whatever evolutionary arguments undergird his opposition to racial diversity efforts, probably because there is a much smaller (though quite enthusiastic) audience for that kind of bunk. Blanket claims about why women aren't born to lead are bound to go further, especially in an industry that rewards single-minded, self-promoting men.

I still think it's heavily implied sexism and racism given the extremely poor argument, vague examples, and a gross misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology that's used to exaggerate the differences and then jump the gun to conclude that women can't lead positions and completely dismiss societal expectations just because of assertions like "it's prevalent throughout all cultures" and "it is highly heritable" (which the latter can also be explained by family conditioning). Whatever his problem with minority outreach programs is, he offers no good reason aside from accusing them as "discriminatory" which is what racists, who refrain from being outright racist and generally resort to a perceived self-victimization, do. There is also the whole KKK and his sympathetic "Imperial Dragon is cool" thing. The Slate article's reasoning aligns well with how I view the article. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 18:47, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@LeftyGreenMario "The last sentence is precisely why it's racism" <- Saying "stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races" is racism? Silly me that I thought that restricting something only to a specific race was racism!

I read though the rest of what you have written and there is not even a single logical argument/an evidence supporting that the claim of the memo aligns with white supremacists. After all, how can a document that makes no comparison among races, especially whites, be white suprematist. The only one making poor arguments it's you. --McLaghing (talk) 21:17, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

No, there is nothing racist about making specific classes for both women and underprivileged races who have historically been shit on and gotten the short end of the stick in order to help them get ahead where otherwise they would have nothing, even those with the resumes and qualifications to get the jobs they want. As opposed to white people, specifically white dudes, who have had it easy and don't get nearly as much shit. Observe why black people are finally glad that a superhero movie specifically them, Black Panther, is finally out and reaching mainstream success. And even that's a long way to go to address the instituional problems in this country. Minorities in Alabama were a good chunk of the vote that ousted Roy Moore, while most white people in the state thought he was just dandy, pedo piece of shit and all. Or even just look at any time when people receiving online help from a tech company have given completely different reactions to men and women. Men were treated with respect while women were looked down upon. Sometimes the women would sometimes play along as a man and be given no shit at all. Reverse the situation again with men playing as women and...well you get the picture.

Also as a little FYI? You are getting far more worked up at people over this memo than you should be. We've had our history, so at least I know why I lashed out at you earlier. But Mario's been extremely accomodating to you every step of the way. James Earl Cash (talk) 22:56, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash it's incredible how much you can write without addressing the question. To make things simpler to both you and @LeftyGreenMario:

(a) A white supremacist is somebody who believe white people are superior, in many ways, to all other people.

(b) To claim that somebody is (/is aligned with) a white supremacist, one needs evidences supporting that fact. There evidences can be: he claiming to be a white supremacist (that's the easier case), he making comparisons between races and concluding that whites are superior to all other races, he acting like whites are superior to all other races.

(c) Damore never claimed to be a white supremacist, never made comparisons between races concluding whites are superior, and he never acted like whites are superior. Surely, he did not do that in his memo.

(d) Conclusion: Claming that Damore is aligned to white supremacists is - to use your terminology - bullshit.

-McLaghing (talk) 23:28, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

You don't need to ping people everytime you respond to them. I'm always on edge now, thinking I'm gonna be de-sysoped anyday now whenever I saw a red mark next to my username. Adding to that, you can't ping people in the history section. Was browsing through and saw you meant to do that with me? Nope, the only reason I responded is because I have an interest in this topic. Anyway...

He's going out of his way to undermine other races' chances at having an equal opportunity in the biased playing field we have by cutting away one of their main sources of support. Yes, that is racist. I don't know if he's an actual white supremacist but he is more aligned with them than he should be, certainly so cuddly with them that yes, we should tar and feather him in the actual article every step of the way. To say nothing of that uh, he defends the KKK and is suing Google over a meme that makes fun of Trumpers. Even when the official stats say that yes, whites are overrepresented at Google and women and minorites have it rough, but he still wants to knock them down a peg over some banal nitpicky version of "racism" that only serves to keep whites in power. Let me say that again if I didn't make it clear enough already: HE IS DEFENDING THE FUCKING KKK!

And if you have a serious interest in this topic, I mean actually be willing to change your views instead of sneer at us like we're a bunch of irrationalists or whatever other cliche you're gunning to use, I'd look at the activities of Neo-Nazis and similar parties these days. Especially since the Charlottesville attack. They outright admit they've ditched the asshole rhetoric about superiority and act in a rational civilized manner in order to gain supporters, especially amongst the young and ignorant, and otherwise fool people who would ordinarily be cracking down on them hard. They'll talk about how every race deserves it's own ethno-state of whatever, separate but equal and all that bullshit. All the while spitting on interracial marriage and spare nary a thought at denying them a foot in the door even in the current order, because according to them, America is white and deserves to stay that way. James Earl Cash (talk) 23:45, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@McLaghing: Maybe James Earl Cash is on to something and perhaps his rudeness to you is deserved. I've said it before: stop clipping stuff I say and then making a strawman after it. I and James Earl Cash agree: those outgroups exist not to shit and exclude white males. Neither were they created to make people think white males are the problem and should be opposed at every degree (which is what Damore thinks when he says the groups discriminate against white males and offers no positives or any sort of reasons they should be opposed outside of the perceived "special treatment"). They were meant to offer support for minorities and women (who were treated like minorities) who, throughout generations have experienced much more blatant and systematic forms of discrimination and today, we're still living in the consequences of it, given old habits and attitudes die hard. These groups are just the same as gay outreach groups or asexual discussion circles like AVEN (and by the way, while their focus is those targeted groups, most of them do encourage participation by everyone, AVEN being one example) who do offer support, resources, guidance, counseling, that sort of thing. To people like Damore, instead of seeing "oh, maybe we should fill the gap for whites or men and create a similar open group focused on them", he sees those groups instead as a threat and then labels them as unfair discrimination. How is this not a good argument? Why aren't you looking past what word-for-word what the document says. The document doesn't explicitly say it hates minorities, but what it does do is attack minority outreach groups, baselessly accusing them of discrimination only because their purpose is to support minorities, which he isn't. What, is he scared of being a minority himself? An "intellectual minority"? An oppressed conservative who can't even voice what the specific fuck are his "unpopular" "conservative" views that are soooo offensive, people will get fired over? Poor oppressed schmuck.

@James Earl Cash To be honest, I'm getting worked up too because McLaghing just dismisses all my arguments as "none of them are logical or evidence" and manages to clip out one of my sentences again and then make a snide strawman out of it ("Silly me that I thought that restricting something only to a specific race was racism!") like I'm double-standard moron who can't see the logical inconsistencies. I listed "the KKK Imperial Dragon thing", the cards Damore plays that come right out of the MRA deck, and of course there's the lawsuit and the company this guy keeps and apparently doesn't want them to be tossed aside lightly, much less thrown with great force. One question: has Damore ever denounced the MRAs and white supremacists who support his work, even a little? If he did, perhaps that'll ease things up, but I haven't seen information on it. I will stand corrected if he actually does, though. I'm thinking I'm being more accommodating of McLaghing than he deserves. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 23:49, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

That's the dictionary definition, which is only one component I'd use to determine whenever someone is a white supremacist. The reality is, though, most white supremacists are sneaky bastards and like to sugar-coat their language like "WHY NOT ALL LIVES MATTER???", It's Okay To Be White, Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white, White guilt, and, written in the Slate article, try to peg minority outreach groups for "it's discrimination" reasons. And there's the whole birth certificate thing which has roots in racism. That being said, I can't say for sure if he's a white supremacist and I don't think it's even relevant if he is or not. The matter is, the company he keeps (his lawyer for instance) is far from pleasant and are literal white supremacists, he is at least sympathetic to KKK, and he abuses science and the agreeable idea of open honest communication and intellectual "diversity" to advance goals including slicking minority outreach groups with "it's reverse-discrimination" mud / "wanting women to be in tech is like wanting women to be in prison", and encouraging "conservative" viewpoints (I doubt they're merely "conservative" especially when in the memo, he never explicitly says what the "conservative" viewpoints are and in this time and age, "conservative viewpoints that are being oppressed even though we'll conveniently leave out how conservatives dominate all powers in government" is well-associated with general bigotry). --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 00:03, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash, @LeftyGreenMario I respond to both of you:

"I mean actually be willing to change your views instead of sneer at us like we're a bunch of irrationalists" <- The only one here who are not willing to challenge their views is you and LeftyGreenMario. Gimme any evidence of Damore supporting white supremacists and I would be glad to put it on the page by myself. The point is that no such evidence has been produced for the claim you made and, since the burden of the proof in on who make the accusation, the one acting dishonestly are you, not certain me. Indeed, both of you said "I don't know if he's an actual white supremacist", "I can't say for sure if he's a white supremacist" so how can you support any claim is such direction!?

"HE IS DEFENDING THE FUCKING KKK!" writing this all CAPS doesn't make it true. Probably the majority of people at Comic-con would say that "Grand Dragon" and "Imperial Wizard" are cool titles, that is not an evidence for support of KKK. Otherwise, Michael Jordan is a Nazi because once he had Hitler-style mustaches... Regarding not demonizing the KKK, he just said that "If you make the actual KKK the only place where you can acknowledge the coolness of D&D terms, then you’ll just push people into the KKK" where KKK could be replaced by anything else without changing in any way the idea. You can said that it is something false, and I agree that such a scenario where people go to the KKK because of cool names is unrealistic, but still there is no support for white supremacists from Damore. Actually, he is giving a (flawed) suggestion to not push people into the KKK.

"has Damore ever denounced the MRAs and white supremacists who support his work, even a little?" <- First, it doesn't matter. If X support the work of Y, X is a white supremacist, and Y does not denounce X, that does not imply that Y is a white supremacist. Yours is some kind of "Guilt by association" fallacy. Second, Damore did denounce them, the entire sentence on cool titles was: "The KKK is horrible and I don’t support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. “Grand Wizard”?" ...

Regarding you being angry for me "clipping stuff" you said, if I do that it is because I am commenting only on the part I quoted. If you start by a wrong premise, I stop you there and I explain while, that's no need to quote your whole paragraph. This makes easier to understand exactly where I disagree with you, while quoting entire long sentences and paragraphs would make that extremely difficult.

That's no point in continuing to avoid the problem: Both of you are not interested in the facts, and you showed that by not providing evidences for your "he's a white supremacist" claim, but just very long ranting of how you feel he is a white supremacist and we should believe you because you can somehow read Damore's mind... --McLaghing (talk) 10:41, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

At this point, I'm ready to call you either a clueless, but stubborn person or an outright intellectually dishonest pain in the ass. One who can't understand or doesn't want to understand the nature of doublespeak (which we have tried to explain to you time and time again through examples; here's another parallel, the creationists and global warming denier twats wanting to advance 'critical thinking' and 'academic freedom' and Academic Freedom Act and you defending them and saying 'where do they explicitly say they want to teach creationism and global warming denial) and how Damore's arguments, his targets being "sacred" minority support groups, are terrible and the company he keeps but won't shoo (including his lawyer) are also terrible. but no, he never actually said he hates minority groups and he isn't a sexist and therefore, our arguments are assumptions just pulled out of our asses. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 21:03, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

That's the long and short of it. All my encounters with McLaghing, he has been obstinate and unyielding to hear my side. When he reverted this page at the first sign of trouble without having a proper discussion, as he's reported me to the brass for having done so in the past to other pages based on perceived slights? When the implication is that he alone should approve any other changes to apparently "his portion" of the page, namely that which concerns the memo alone (and not Damore's later acitivites)? That was my breaking point. James Earl Cash (talk) 21:45, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Was my mistake on defending him the first time. I'm sorry about that. On my part, Basic income, I had little interest and knowledge about income, and I thought you two were bickering and you reached breaking point, and I saw only the insults and all. I'd still refrain from personal attacks though, though I myself may have slipped with "pain in the ass", close to other things, but I have to be honest... --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 22:08, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Heh, it's alright. I can only guess at what you have to deal with as a mod on a regular basis by comparison, and in the wake of everything simmering down past my one hour block, my big wall o' text above probably just cemented peoples' impressions of me. Still, yours truly's reaction to, ahem, current events could have gotten a lot uglier all things considered, so I'm glad at least that didn't happen. James Earl Cash (talk) 04:49, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Sure thing. I want to be fair to both sides though, and I think ignoring requests for me to come would not look on my end. Without engaging myself, I'm slow to make assumptions about anything, which means I have to take both of your words' for it. When I see language being more colorful in one side, I'm inclined to think that side is getting unhinged and unnecessarily nasty so I just end up targeting that side and defending the other. This has happened before with ikanreed and Ariel, where I had to tell off ikanreed and defend Ariel despite the latter making arguments I strongly disagree with. But I think I have better idea now with you two, but I do hope this doesn't happen again. I really hope those incidents will make people learn that strong language can cause mods like me to misunderstand and take decisions that may not be in the best interest of the quality of the articles. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 22:58, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Yeah I'll definitely try to rein myself in the future no matter what happens. Especially now that I've cleared my name, I'll do my best not to jeopardize that anytime soon.

@McLaghing, I don't know if you're still reading this, but as a final note, there is no excuse for the way you're acting right now. Regardless of what happened between us in the past, and I'm not going to be deliberately obtuse and pretend you might not have taken offense at me taking a stab at this article after you made it given our history, there's one thing here: You won. You won on the basic income page and you won here, but now you're alienating yourself from the people who had your back. Even if you had reservations with some of my additions here, you had a chance to prove your side when the mods had your back but you quit at the first sign of trouble and were quick to lash out. Especially with your ridiculous edit warring going on now which I know given the notes you're leaving in the history section, is a callback to us having had at it on the Molyneux page when I was still a regular user. You're digging your own hole. Quit while you're ahead. James Earl Cash (talk) 04:55, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

I characterize the edit warring and mocking behavior as juvenile and spiteful. Let's act like grown ups, we are better than this. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 06:14, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash "when I was still a regular user" <- I have to curb your enthusiasm: You are still a regular user. Essentially everybody here becomes a sysop, there's nothing special about that.

"You're digging your own hole" <- Which hole? After some experiments, I'm now sure that editing this wiki is a waste of time. It has been fun for a short time, and I have learn many interesting things (by my own), especially while writing the page on cognitive differences between sexes. But putting more effort in: explaining every since sentence, writing numbered lists of each of my rebuttal/proposal, answering to every rebuttal by argumentation and evidences... while on the other side the "arguments" are: "I think it sounds like...", "HE IS DEFENDING THE FUCKING KKK!", "It's doublespeak...", etc. Then, no thanks. I can spend my time in more interesting and productive ways. Have fun in your "echo chamber", to quote Damore. --McLaghing (talk) 16:28, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, CowHouse warned you about blocking MAI742 because he was a fellow sysop, Cheeseburger gave you a warning right here that you might lose your privileges and Bongolian admonished me in the Basic Income page for behavior unbecoming a sysop right after I was given the reins when we first had at it on that particular talk page. You are far too cavalier about this. But hey, it's your choice. James Earl Cash (talk) 17:30, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Your arguments were just just "he didn't explicitly said he was racist or sexist so his statements can't be racist or sexist, much less a white supremacist or an MRA". Also, we've looked at your criticism, considered them, rejected them. You might not like the result, but it's not an echo chamber. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 19:55, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

@LeftyGreenMario saying it is doublespeak doesn't get you out of the requirement of providing evidence that he is in fact double speaking. Because, "doublespeak" is non-falsifiable and not a legitimate argument unless you can back it up with evidence that he is doing so (actually its pretty much a conspiracy theory). I could argue that you are really a Russian Troll because I don't like what you are saying but unless I have evidence, none of us have any reason to take me seriously. And when you accuse someone of double speak you make argument impossible because there is no way to defend against that claim as it isn't falsifiable. So Mario, prove to me you aren't a Russian troll and I'll agree your doublespeak argument is legit. As to the creationists, we know they are double speaking when they say they are "advancing critical thinking" because they are saying we should put creationism in schools at the exact same time! So it isn't double speak at all, it is in fact single speak, they are saying exactly what they want.

Also, FYI, affirmative action is by definition systemic discrimination against white men. Don't bother debating me, go pick up your dictionary and argue with that if you don't like it, it's not my fault, it's the dictionary. However, we can have a debate whether or not its a productive way to counter past discrimination against minorities (hint: it is). But we have to recognize that this is a lesser of two evils argument because it is evil to discriminate against individual white men based on their gender and race. But it is more evil to allow the systemic racism to continue to harm minorities today. In effect, affirmative action is an ends justify the means argument. If you actually read Damore's memo you'll see that Damore is trying to question whether the ends justify the means and whether there are alternative ways to achieve the ends. He is also pointing out that anyone who questions the means is instantly attacked (which your implications that he is racist just prove). When read in this light it might help you understand how his arguments are not in fact sexist or racist and why your whole guilt by perceived association argument doesn't really work here. In fact, the premise of his argument was that we should judge people as individuals and not as members of a race or gender, this is the opposite of racism and sexism. I think this is what @McLaghing was trying to get you to realize. You are reading this through a lens that is likely very different from the lens it was written under and you are thus jumping to conclusions that aren't in the memo. The principal of charity dictates we should interpret someone's writings in the best light possible. So why don't we do that here, this could be a good learning moment for you.

TLDR. The whole KKK thing and thing about him aligning with white supremacists and the implication that he is racist are total BS, unsupported, an association fallacy, and guilty by association and should be taken down. Lansellion (Talk) 06:55, 15 March 2018 (UTC)

Sorry Mario for stealing (what Lans intended to be) your thunder, but I saw this person and had to respond.

Damore's actively trying to undermine affirmative action and programs for women/minorities but cloaks it by concern trolling, then moves onto the ludicrous assertion that white conservatives are somehow discriminated against by virtue of something as private as their politics, which both has no place at work and is especially ridiculous when conservatism has taken on a new meaning in today's America. You're essentially restricting double speak to a very narrow definition, to the point that we can't say anything negative about him or judge his words. Despite some of his shady statements when it comes to attempts to eliminating systemic workplace discrimination on actual biological traits like race and gender and especially his goofier ones about the KKK. And sure, he wants us to look at individuals, but still makes sweeping statements about women anyway while not accounting for how damaging the system itself is to the individuals he claims to speak for. Sounds totes legit.

The idea that people are intolerant of what he's saying to the point that he was fired for it which somehow proves his point is the tired and trite canard that yes, people are intolerant of intolerance. How horrible for him, I did a kick step and a hop when Fred Phelps bit the dust. Guess I'm a complete monster. It's also a tautological circlejerk that is preloaded with Damore's conclusion in mind instead of analyzing the larger atmosphere and the circumstances surrounding his firing. Someone who makes quite frankly bizarre statements about the KKK after being fired for statements about race and gender is not someone I'm inclined to look at in a favorable light, sorry not sorry. I don't think Damore is an actual white supremacist if only because I quite frankly think he's too dull for any of that sort of business, but his quick flirtation with alt-right figures like Molyneux and Peterson raises more than a few eyebrows. I sincerely wouldn't be surprised if he made any formal alignment anytime soon or if he made a remark that revealed he privately had racist beliefs. James Earl Cash (talk) 05:37, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

"He is also pointing out that anyone who questions the means is instantly attacked (which your implications that he is racist just prove)."

I see it more as people dismissing his arguments and calling them ludicrous (the comparison to prison representation, again, is god awful to borderline offensive and I understand why people would think he's a sexist). If he wants to present an actual discussion, perhaps he can try finding sources that aren't opinion articles that compare white conservatives' plight to black and gays passing (IMO is pretty hideously offensive too). If he seriously wants discussion, he should take much more care on his research. He failed to demonstrate that tact on a sensitive subject. If he gave us actual facts to work with, not slime like Christina Hoff Sommers and Warren Ferrell or misrepresentation of actual research. He also doesn't really care about the company he attracts either. Aside from frequent naked assertions otherwise, what has Damore seriously done to distance himself from actual sexists and racists? His reading comprehension and reasoning are sloppy and careless. I think it's on him if he's "unfairly" categorized as a racist or sexist, and moreso when his derisive and self-victimizing language, directed at the institutions he targets, reflects alt-lite talking points. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 03:55, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Re:Doxxing

This article states that Damore was doxxed. Is it true? If so, should be mentioned in the article, as it's a despicable action and we don't condone that kind of behavior.

Oh, a wordy side-note I also mostly disagree with the article. I don't disagree there are inherent biological differences, but Soh doesn't rule out any confounding societal conditioning factors between the correlation of testosterone and a preference for male-typical toys. After all, male-typical, wheeled toys didn't exist, much less defined as "male-typical" for most of humanity. What if the researchers told the kids, say, that a pink car was for boys and a blue car was for girls? Or an otherwise gender-neutral toy colored to be either male or female? How is "male-typical" defined? I don't know much of the research beyond the abstract. Soh thinks the people who have a problem with the memo think there ARE no differences between the brains or deny that women are prone to higher anxiety, but there are people have a problem because the memo exaggerates those differences and then makes the conclusion that women can't achieve higher positions because of those differences, which is the sexist element of it. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 22:00, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

I'd avoid it for now, if my humble opinion is being considered. She doesn't cite any proof of him being doxxed or offer any specifics. For all we know, she could be referring to the big media hubbub following him being fired.

Also, in much of Europe and Asia, blue is a girls' color, and pink/red are boys' colors. Pink for a long time even in the states wasn't considered to be feminine until the 50s I think. And then there's the matter of transgender and nonbinary people. Or how women dominated computer science fields compared to men until the mid-80s. Damore says that computer science wasn't a lucrative high status position back then, but that doesn't account for his nomenclature of interest in people vs. things that he's so hung up on when it comes to gender differences. So yeah, I deffo think Soh isn't getting the overall picture of why people were offended. James Earl Cash (talk) 04:55, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9

Found this after doing some Google-fu, seems like it would interest you and a GREAT counterpoint to Damore's memo. I don't know where it could be added to the article or even if it could, but something to keep in mind for future revisions. James Earl Cash (talk) 06:29, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

"She doesn't cite any proof of him being doxxed " <- Wait! Now do you need proofs for claiming something? The more you talk the more you show your double standard... --McLaghing (talk) 09:13, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

For the record, nobody here claimed Damore was a white supremacist. However his goals are scarily close to their's when it comes to eliminating diversity outreach programs, a goal that would only be racist and hurt other races. Not getting into his dubious company since then. If you don't see how saying the KKK is cool or whatever is not something that raises serious red flags then yeah...I'm struggling to even think of a way to put it that you'd get since his earlier statements haven't ruffled your feathers. James Earl Cash (talk) 16:03, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash: I did have the coloring in mind when it came to pink = boy and blue = girl, I was even expecting that kind of response, heh. Hence, I did have the entire "socialization can reverse just like that" which throws a big question on the definition of what exactly a "male-typical" toy is. On the other hand, the color itself is a good control IMO because it doesn't change the actual shape of the thing (see, what if I prefer dolls over cars because they're easy to throw and cuddle with, not because it's a girl's toy; I actually love both dolls and cars though the "dolls" I mainly played with are the Mario ones...). Not the best control though because who knows if color preferences are even sex-related, so maybe an extra control saying the colored toys are neutral.

I took the time to read the link and I think so far, we can put it in the external link. I couldn't comprehend some of it, though, since I kinda gloss over "gene expression" but I think I got the general idea: it's complicated. Hence, my problem with Damore's memo was how oversimplified it is. To be fair on my end, I didn't check his sources that much (I should've but I kind of tried to go easy on myself, I don't have training to parse through a lot of science papers since they're garbled so that's really difficult for me to think critically; it's even worse to try to be critical of science papers when they reach conclusions I find satisfactory).

To be clear, I don't think Damore is straight-on white supremacist, and if you think I did, I probably gave the wrong impression, but Damore flirts with it and doesn't really distance himself, maybe he doesn't have strong opinions either way. Fine. To his credit, he does more of an effort than Trump at least. There's one thing criticizing minority support programs, but you have to be reasonable and make good arguments. If you don't, it just comes off as attacking them for no reason and that'll make people think you have worse intentions. My opinion, I think firing is a little strong, but his memo was insulting to me because the generalizations he makes about me and how he assumes people who share similar viewpoints to me, "the left" are blind and unaccommodating, they're insulting generalizations. If I was in a large game company and there was a memo written about female developers who can't advance in their careers because they have innate biological features such as being nervous and more interested in "people" than "things", I'd be offended though not angry. Just upset. Like "I'm not like that, I love 'things'" and "well, I'm generally nervous, but this memo makes me more upset and nervous, and is this what my male coworkers think of me?" And "I value women's game development outreach because I feel alone and alien in a male-dominated environment, and I'm nervous if I'll ever get sexually harassed and all... I really don't like how he's targeting those". And "I.... wonder what your 'conservative' viewpoints are... I need to know so I won't have a knee-jerk reaction and we can come to an understanding even if we disagree." I wouldn't resign over a silly memo, but it makes me uncomfortable, and it's worse when the reasoning in the memo is not even good.

@McLaghing I don't understand that "double standard". Analyzing a paper, as we did, also requires support, which we've shown. We never argued that they don't need support, we just say that the "assertions" are backed up by reasoning, which includes us providing examples and parallels of dodgy language that is used in the paper. Doxxing, unlike our previous arguments, that requires a reference.

I ping in response because I myself sometimes miss out on new responses and promptly forget. I think that happens to people a lot, especially with those with ADHD, like me. So, doesn't hurt to ping. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 22:52, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

@LeftyGreenMarioI think you are over reading the article when you complain that it didn't address whether society or biology cause gender differences. First off, it was a memo designed to start a conversation on the subject. Second, the cause is totally irrelevant to the conversation. His point was that there might be fewer women interested in tech (btw he never said anything about women being less capable of achieving high positions, he stated that they might be less interested in it. There is a huge difference between those two things). If it is true that women have a lower interest level in tech (I have no idea, don't know if there is good research on this), it does not matter if it is caused by nature or nurture because the differences do in fact exist. The primary purpose was to criticize the culture where it was deemed unacceptable to bring up differences between genders which really do exist. And to your point about people being mad about the differences between men and women being "exaggerated" need to consider seriously his point about more men being in prison or homeless. If you think the gender differences are exaggerated that means you think that more men are homeless due to sexism against men and that more men are in prison because sexism that causes the system to go lighter on women than men. We could extend further and say that rape and sexual harassment on men by women must be under reported because the differences between men and women are negligible. So the argument that the differences between men and women are slight should lead to policies that try to raise awareness of the sexual violence perpetrated by women on men and increase enforcement of crimes against women. If you don't agree with those ideas, then you need to be willing to admit that the gender differences are potentially bigger than you would like to admit. Point being, the criticism regarding differences between men and women being minor is a really weak point unless you are willing to admit men are significantly discriminated against when it comes to homelessness and criminal punishment. Lansellion (talk) 04:36, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Oh Jesus, this got ugly fast. I must be a sucker for punishment returning to the same flamebait when I've made few significant changes on other articles since then like I should be doing, but I'm gonna make this quick.

Yes, there probably is systemic discrimination against men when it comes to homelessness and punishment. Ever heard of toxic masculinity? That only proves that yes, systemic discrimination exists and it counts for a lot when it comes to people's opportunities! So it's not surprising that the odds are stacked against women and minorities too, not by any biology but by the system itself! You don't know if women are naturally less interested in tech? What are you doing here then? Because there's definitely more than a bit of hostility in your demands to be civil at all costs. James Earl Cash (talk) 05:20, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

"The primary purpose was to criticize the culture where it was deemed unacceptable to bring up differences between genders which really do exist. And to your point about people being mad about the differences between men and women being "exaggerated" need to consider seriously his point about more men being in prison or homeless."

It didn't bring anything worthwhile in the conversation. No one has ever denied differences between the genders, but the document at the same time grossly oversimplifies and exaggerates them. And the whole idea of "more men being in prison or homeless" wasn't even part of that memo, was it? The memo was more about whining about oppressed white conservative men (without every specifying what "conservatism" they're talking about) and also oversimplifying the research cited here. And if you're going to bring up "but what about prison and homelessness", I can also say "minorities are also overrepresented in prison and homelessness" yet the document wants to undercut minority outreach groups, those designed to address the disadvantage minorities face, because he believes they discriminate against white men. At the same time, while men are sometimes at a disadvantage in some cases, the very big picture is that women are at a disadvantage.

The only mention of "homelessness" and the implied "men dominate homelessness rates" is when he makes an atrocious analogy that "increasing women representation in tech is like wanting to have more women homeless". I shouldn't have to explain how utterly stupid it is, I hope. If he wants a real discussion, he should at least think his own argument through, not quarter-ass it like this in a middle of an airplane flight. If this is really how he argues, no wonder nobody takes his "conservative" viewpoints seriously.

By far the biggest problem in this memo, IMO, is Damore's vagueness on his "conservative" views. A lot of times, people self-describe themselves as "conservative" when in reality, they're bigots. If he doesn't specify what he means by "conservative" all while misrepresenting research and disparaging minority outreach groups as "reverse-discrimination" for no good reason, it raises a stink for me. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 19:57, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

""(btw he never said anything about women being less capable of achieving high positions, he stated that they might be less interested in it. There is a huge difference between those two things)"

"Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership."

"Im simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership."

"List of personality differences"

What is this then? I don't see any statement that "women are simply less interested", at least not in the memo. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 20:04, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

@Lansellion I left a message on your talk page but you must not have read it. At the end of your comment, you appear to be writing your username and then five tildes. Instead, please sign using four tildes: ~~~~. This will automatically include a timestamp and links to your user page and user talk page. CowHouse (talk) 07:07, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Christ, you really have lost it haven't you

Perfectly nice, intelligent guy writes a very balanced (oops, can't have that can we) fair-minded and even-handed critique of cowardly capitulation to liberal fascism online and you write a hack-job smear-piece attacking him. Think I'd find more intellectual honesty at Huff Post. --Let Them Eat Cake (talk) 19:37, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

This talk page is a mess

Brevity. Concise. Impossible. —ClickerClock (talk) 04:24, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

I feel I expend way too much verbiage explaining my stance on things. Is the main article at least good? --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 04:43, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

It's very through with debunking that memo. Great work. But wall of text. —ClickerClock (talk) 04:48, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

thanks! But hey, if wall-of-text leads to better article, it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 04:56, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Correct. —ClickerClock (talk) 04:57, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

See also: Talk:Water fluoridation. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 04:47, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Damn. —ClickerClock (talk) 04:48, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

The article seems to be fairly well organized and balanced. I don't think it debunks Damore's memo though: I would call it an expression of concern, with a little "alt-right, and nazis and science--oh my!" Ariel31459 (talk) 14:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Some criticism may appear to be idiotic to neutral parties.

"While his initial attitude was questionable and had attracted the plucky company of the sexist MRAs and white supremacists, his further actions would just further paint him as just another poor white dude who cries, "Come see the violence Inherent in the System! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" and, beyond that, has nothing useful to offer when it comes to critiquing help for minorities and women (or, as he calls it, positive discrimination) or the suffering "conservative minority viewpoint" despite conservatives dominating all branches of government in the U.S., like similar poor white dudes in his company." What is wrong with this "block"? Just about everything. Ariel31459 (talk) 23:25, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

The only thing I can think of is maybe the tone, but everything else was what I garnered from this guy. Damore thinks white conservatives are "silenced". They're certainly not, as their own government represents them. If anything, white male conservatives get their platform all the time, see the entire Kevin "Women with abortions should be hanged" Williamson nonsense. He was booted off for having half-baked views, but he never loses that voice, does he? --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 23:43, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

It is histrionic, suggests a bigoted attitude of its very own, and incoherently the US Government is cited to demonstrate what? Do I have to explain "As above, so below?" is a specious argument? And now you point out Kevin Williamson was fired too. Good, he is a freaking nut. But it is an incoherent view that the two incidences are related.Ariel31459 (talk) 00:02, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

Using Trump to argue white conservatives have it all nice and dandy might not work the way you hope. The reason he won is exactly because a lot of them are doing bad economically and they've been losing the culture wars for several decades (and because Obama didn't deliver on anything, and Hillary's mockery of a campaign). He's not even a conservative himself, he's just an opportunistic businessman who managed to make the GOP his bitch. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 00:48, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Mmmm, the only consistent profile of a Trump voter is race. That's not to deny Trump received a consider bloc of blue-collar workers, but I don't agree entirely with the economic anxiety aspect of it. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 00:54, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

The Trump voter's consistent profile is the very demographic consistently neglected by the Democrats' identity politics? Colour me unsurprised. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 00:59, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Er, you should probably read the article. It's racism that elected the president. White conservatives have historically supported racist policies so... --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 01:05, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Well, that was one swooping load of conjecture I just read. Too bad I can't go back in time to undo it. Don't believe everything you read. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 02:03, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh well, I generally accept things that I believe are well-thought out and referenced. Sorry that didn't convince you. There's also other articles that dispute the economic anxiety argument, such as here. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 03:47, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Note I did mention the culture wars earlier. "Economic anxiety" as you call it is just one part of the "forgotten people" notion Trump campaigned on. Also, that's a pretty sketchy standard to go by. I could write a well-thought out, well-referenced piece about the economic infeasibility of conducting a moon landing in the sixties, lay out how much more feasible it would be to fake it, and back it up with fake moon rocks the US actually put out there after the moon landing. We still went to the moon though. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 04:51, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

BoN, have you ever considered why certain voter demographics are neglected? For example, last I checked neither Republicans nor Democrats had any interest in winning over Islamic extremists. Why? Because it would be political suicide. Nor is either side really taking up arms to support the rights of ex-cons, though Cthulhu knows they should. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 04:02, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Lol, I wasn't suggesting catering to white nationalists. But it's not hard to see how identity politics disregards the majority of the US population (which happens to be majority white). 141.134.75.236 (talk) 04:38, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Exactly how does identity politics disregards the majority of the U.S. population? There were tons of identity politics surrounding being white and/or Christian (remember the "Moral Majority"?) before Trump amplified it. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 20:15, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Well, there's a blast from the past. But it's pretty clear I was referring specifically to present-day identity politics as used by Democrats. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 20:24, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Alright then BoN. Suppose we can't always accept literature regardless of how well-referenced it is (certainly a point I'm willing to accept). How is this specific Atlantic piece wrong? RoninMacbeth (talk) 05:03, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

Anon IP person, throwing out vague catchphrases like identity politics without significant backing isn't going to do you any favors to begin with. Culture war? Are you going to start shrieking about SJWs? In addition, the idea that mostly blue collar people voted for Trump is an urban legend right up there with Bloody Mary and the Chupacabra.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/9/15592634/trump-clinton-racism-economy-prri-survey

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.593f42bc5ae7

You learn something new everyday. James Earl Cash (talk) 20:05, 27 August 2018 (UTC)

May someone please remove this sentence?

This sentence "In addition to implying that women were less skilled at their jobs at others, he created the atmosphere of discrimination he claimed he was fighting against." is, I would argue, ideologically motivated. Unless you can point out where in Damore's memo he implied women were "less skilled at their jobs", this sentence appears to me as written by a left-leaning ideologue with poor reading comprehension. --Moobnert (talk) 12:42, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Go ahead and improve it. The sentence is also ungrammatical: "less skilled at their jobs at others," It can't stand as is.Ariel31459 (talk) 12:50, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Honestly, giving this article a second read reaffirms to me that it is so uncompromisingly tainted with left-leaning ideologue ranting that making it more 'rational' and less ideologue-oriented would be fighting a steep uphill battle. For now, I'll leave my suggestion up for a few days and see if any other RW editors present a counterargument. If not, I'll go ahead and remove the sentence.--Moobnert (talk) 18:29, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Grammatical hiccups aside, when he says that women are naturally more neurotic and more suited to part-time work than full-time work, I think that's a pretty big indictment on it's own. When he says that early computer science was "just accounting," as if that means anything, not getting into how many women were pioneers in the field back in the day, yes, that is an attack. When he dismisses attempts to get women into tech based on these red herrings, it doesn't need justification. It's self-evident.

I also think you might be trying to reinvent the wheel here. There doesn't need to be a balance. Hardcore centrists in the 30s-40s, and now after the Charlottesville attack, campaigned for Nazis to have their right to free speech, ignoring the fact that they're fricking Nazis. Hateful rhetoric doesn't need to be aired out or given a platform, and should be condemned at every opportunity. It's been heard. It needs to be shut down. This kind of talk is more popular with people than the public is willing to accept. Nazism was an actual movement that led to millions killed and a nationalistic empire based on racism. In the states, the KKK held quite a bit of power in the shadows back in the day. Even now, actual Nazis are making a resurgence. I should add that I don't think he's any of these or that anyone here is advocating for that, though Damore's weird tweets about the KKK still ruffle my feathers. But I think striving for "balance" here might be a misguided mission.

Still, with all that in mind, perhaps then it's only appropriate that Damore's actions receive the censure they have. James Earl Cash (talk) 00:04, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash Your comment is a prime example of what I was referring to when I mentioned how RW articles are uncompromisingly tainted with left-leaning ideologue banter with no rational basis to justify such banter. If you define 'rational' at its simplest to mean able to be demonstrated scientifically, then you should realize based on relevant peer-reviewed literature that women are on average more neurotic than men and this is a robust and cross-culturally consistent finding. So rationally, this shouldn't be a point of reference to criticize Damore on because his statements are consistent with literature. As for your second point, I don't think I've ever heard Damore say women are "more suited to part-time work than full-time work" and you're welcome to find a direct quote to show otherwise. I've heard Damore use words like "prefer", not "suited" because he has spoken about women tending to prefer part-time work over full-time in order to achieve a work and family life balance. If by "suited" you are implying that Damore is implying women are more 'biologically suited' for part-time over full-time work, then that interpretation is a manifestation of your leftist ideologue bias. I remain thoroughly unconvinced that Damore's statements on gender differences of trait neuroticism and women's preference for part-time work are an indictment of his i.e. bigotry, or lack of being rational.

As for your comment on Damore's statement of earlier programming being more akin to 'just accounting' than today's programming, I suppose you have some leeway to state your views on this without me immediately considering your perspective as a leftist ideologue viewpoint. This is because you can interpret 'just accounting' and Damore's choice to describe it as such in several ways. Personally, I understood from Damore's comment that the level of complexity for programming has evolved to such an extent that programming from the early days and today are not practically comparable in terms of hands-on work and the process by which you learn how to perform such work. Hence, if you believe early day and contemporary programming isn't comparable as to what the profession entails from a worker, then you should expect the tendency for either gender to freely select the profession in the pursuit of their own interests to also be different for early day vs. contemporary programming. So that can be a factor in determining the change in ratio of men and women working programming jobs during the course of programming's evolution.

Either way, discussing the ratio of men and women in programming over time is completely missing the point. If you read Damore's memo, he is addressing Google's diversity objectives at obtaining a 50/50 male/female parity. He then pointed out that Google probably will not achieve this parity not because Google is some sexist institution that favors male applicants over female ones (consider their mandatory diversity objectives and quotas), but probably because men and women are interested in different things and these interest averages of the genders will tend the genders towards unequal outcomes such as choice in profession. This is just logical, but it appears it's extremely difficult for some lefties to consider factors in disparities that isn't just blunt discrimination. Not every social disparity or discrepancy can be adequately explained with discrimination.

Another important point is that Damore is not dismissing "attempts to get women into tech based on these red herrings" because 1. Damore's memo is about facilitating women getting into tech, not preventing them and 2. those points you listed aren't red herrings since personality differences of men and women is not an irrelevant distraction to the main issue of women's representation in tech, and neither is the propensity for either gender to uptake part-time or full-time work. The evolution of programming is also important in addressing the question of why women's representation in tech fluctuated over time the way that it did because you cannot assume that programming as a profession has remained constant in terms of work-related content from its early days to now.

Your last paragraph is completely pointless leftist ideologue ranting that has nothing to do with Damore or his memo because nothing Damore said constitutes "hateful rhetoric" as you put it. The fact that you would consider Damore's points as "hateful rhetoric" shows me how completely lost you are in your leftist bias. And don't get me wrong, as a left-leaning person myself, I'm also biased as well. But the difference is I at least try to reconcile my bias with rationality. The easiest way to do that in the case of Damore is to actually read the bloody memo he wrote and evaluate it using the scientific literature. In that memo, he spoke of ways to reduce the gender gap in tech, including "We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration." Based on Damore's understanding of psychology literature, where men tend to be more thing-oriented, and women tend to be more people-oriented, he uses this knowledge to state how he thinks Google can reduce the gender gap. He is actively trying to pursue the very same goals Google has, the same goals I would have, and the same goals you would presumably have, which is to make a company's work appealing to both men and women and not unfairly disadvantage and hinder one gender over the other.

I mean, Google seems to me to be trying it's best to obtain parity of gender by including mandatory diversity training programs as well as pressuring bosses leading programming groups in Google to meet the demand of their diversity quotas. Despite all this effort, women's representation in tech hovers around 25%. Are you really going to argue this is a consequence of discrimination? You really don't think there are rational ways to explain a gender gap in circumstances where an individual's personal choice in pursuing a programming career is one of the main arbiters in determining what the gender representation will be? And don't think for a second that I ignore discrimination as a factor in gender disparities, but I strongly argue based on my experience that left-leaning individuals have a propensity to attribute gender disparities entirely to discrimination, and when you try to point out to them that gender differences in interests will tend the genders unequally in the career world, they will tell you you're espousing "hateful rhetoric." What you end up doing is alienating allies like Damore in the pursuit of obtaining a fair accommodating workplace for women in male-dominated lines of work. It's not a good strategy. --Moobnert (talk) 12:55, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

A bit of a wall of text there, so I'm going to keep this short and address the main points.

You should actually read the studies Damore quoted. Look at the reactions of scientists. Lots of them have taken issue with the way he's interpreted studies, and some of the studies that he quoted said that the personality differences in question were miniscule at best. It's definitely overreaching to try and shut the discussion down by saying that peer-reviewed literature supports any of what he says in the slightest. I'd also say that someone who compares trying to get women into tech on par with men as compared to trying to get women equally represented in prisons has already shot themselves in the foot. When he repeatedly emphasizes biology, that speaks for itself. So no, I'm not going to give him any mercy.

Your own comments on accounting and early computer science are self-damning nonsense too. You are actually claiming that nowadays women aren't smart enough for computer science because back then it was so simple which is insulting enough, never mind the numerous female pioneers of computer science that helped launch it to where it is. Beyond that, in poorer nations even today that use the same tech we do, women tend to dominate computer science fields as opposed to men. Want to try and explain that one away?

re: Your spiel about Google not being a sexist institution and that men and women are naturally interested in different things. Utter nonsense. Attempts to get more women and POC into tech doesn't equate to actually doing it. Look at the stats for the company. They are failing, badly. Besides, a megacorp like Google can afford to get away with being discriminatory. They're big and rich. They're Google. For crying out loud, you are assuming far too much good faith from them. Damore himself has slammed diversity programs and was praised for it. His recommendation was a set of solutions which don't help anyone in substantive depth and reduces women's place in the workplace to practically that of second class citizens. Next you're going to say that #MeToo is bollocks.

Yeah they're red herrings, although that's being extraordinarily nice about them. They're also bigoted nonsense that don't lead anywhere and say nothing about the actual science on men and women, or actually address the problem. Women choose their professions based on work related content? I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but I already don't like it. Damore even admitted that men also came to dominate computer science when it was seen as more high-status. So you have no leg to stand on.

He doesn't have to call women a bunch of nagging stupid harpies on alimony in order to be offensive. When he downplays attempts to get women into tech and tries to "improve" their place based on a bunch of stupid stereotypes that ironically enough keep them from getting on equal footing with men, yes, that is bigotry.

Yes, I think it is discrimination. You are giving way too much credit to Google, where men and white people are still over-represented. Even if they are legitimately trying their hardest, what goes on in these diversity programs and the attempts to get people on-board with others is not going to go down well with the status quo. To the point that even Ariel in trying to cover for Damore's ass unintentionally showed a problem here, where a transgender person was fired for being exactly that. And your use of "rational" is pretty close to a meaningless buzzword.

As a final closer, whining about "leftist ideologue bias," all the while claiming you're left-leaning is a red flag if I've ever seen one. Next you're gonna start whining about how them gosh dern SJWs are the root of all the modern day problems in society while the REAL LEFT needs to take the Dave Rubin route. James Earl Cash (talk) 15:41, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Holy ****. You are so far gone in your leftist ideology; you're completely blind to it. It's unreal honestly. I could comment on so much of what you just wrote, but it's doubtful you'll listen to reason. But maybe you will listen to reason with science, so I will only address the science behind Damore's claims.

You said "You should actually read the studies Damore quoted. Look at the reactions of scientists." Okay, let's do that. Professor David P. Schmitt, psychologist and director of ISDP leading the largest cross-cultural research team in nearly 60 countries around the world, has stated "A Google employee recently shared a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences (e.g., personality traits, mate preferences, status-seeking)...I think it’s really important to discuss this topic scientifically, keeping an open mind and using informed skepticism when evaluating claims about evidence. In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. For instance, sex differences in negative emotionality [neuroticism] are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth"

I believe Dr. Schmitt is a worthy example among all scientific researchers to cite because he 1. states unequivocally that the research of gender differences is strong, thereby vindicating Damore's claims on gender differences and proving your fake skepticism of Damore's emphasis on biology to be ideologically driven and 2. Schmitt provides relevant commentary which favors your side of the argument:

"But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace...the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance). So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe...most of these sex differences are moderate in size and in my view are unlikely to be all that relevant to the Google workplace..Sex differences in occupational interests, personal values, and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size, but most psychological sex differences are only small to moderate in size...Now, treating people as dichotomous sexes is exactly what many affirmative action policies do. As this is not my area of expertise, I can only offer my non-expert opinion on this issue, which is this: There have been (and likely will continue to be) many socio-structural barriers to women working in technological jobs. These include culturally-embedded gender stereotypes, biased socialization practices, in some cultures explicit employment discrimination, and a certain degree of masculinization of technological workplaces. Within this sea of gender bias, should Google use various practices (affirmative action is not just one thing) to especially encourage capable women of joining (and enjoying) the Google workplace? I vote yes. At the same time, should we be able to openly discuss and be informed by some of the real psychological sex differences that might account for variation in men’s and women’s workplace performance? In the right context, I vote yes to that, too."

So do you agree with the professor or not? He supports your viewpoint in that affirmative action is one positive way to increase women's representation in tech, but he also makes it clear that the science cited in Damore's memo is strong and cannot be dismissed. So the scientific literature which Damore based his argument off is solid and you can't dismiss it so easily. That wouldn't be rational. Also, let's compare Dr. Schmitt's comments on small to moderate sex differences (<10% variance) and compare it to the essence of Damore's argument as he wrote in his memo:

"Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. 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."

So Damore doesn't seem to say much that contradicts the viewpoint of Dr. Schmitt. I would say the problem with leftist ideologues is that, while they recognize that all social phenomena can be explained through 1. biological and 2. environmental factors, they are more likely to attribute all observed instances of social disparities to environmental factors (discrimination!) and they give almost no credence to biological factors. It is very difficult for them to believe that biological factors can in part explain a social discrepancy such as unequal representation of men and women in certain career choices.

I do have to reply to another one of your god awful pitiful remarks though. You said "You are actually claiming that nowadays women aren't smart enough for computer science because back then it was so simple which is insulting enough. Beyond that, in poorer nations even today that use the same tech we do, women tend to dominate computer science fields as opposed to men. Want to try and explain that one away?"

First of all, I can explain that (in part). Poorer countries are typically less gender egalitarian than richer countries, and in poorer and less gender egalitarian societies, men and women are less free to pursue their innate interests because they have more grievances to deal with, which can influence their career choice more strongly than personal interest. They've done studies on this; the more gender egalitarian the society is, the larger the gender gap becomes for occupations such as programming (or other examples: engineering, nursing). Gender differences in occupation have gotten bigger in these egalitarian societies over time. If you make society more gender egalitarian, then you are (in a way of conceiving the concept) flattening out environmental variability with respect to gender roles (you can be/act however you want) and opportunities (equal to both genders), and if you flatten out environmental variability, all that's left is biological variability and so it maximizes. Men and women have different interests on average, and if people are free to pursue their interests then there will be some disparity in gender representations across various careers. This is not a bigoted concept. This is not even a radical argument. It is actually quite logical and coherent. Hopefully you'll come around and agree.

Second of all, this interpretation "women aren't smart enough for computer science because back then it was so simple" is a result of your bias. Why in god's name would I ever claim or imply that computer science has become more complex therefore women aren't smart enough for today's computer science? Are you serious? To quickly clarify things, you can probably already tell I'm very adamant on referencing the scientific literature, and the science on intelligence shows quite clearly that there are no differences in average intelligences of men and women, so I would never argue or imply such a stupid god forsaken claim that women are not smart enough to do computer science, which by the way, Damore has stated many times that women can be brilliant programmers and he's met many competent female programmers and even his bloody memo is an argument to facilitate increasing the representation of women in tech. I hope you realize that neither I nor Damore are fundamentally your ideological enemies. We all agree on facilitating women's representation in tech. The only difference is you are narrowly focusing on discrimination as a factor causing unequal representations due to your leftist bias (this is not an insult; both the left and right have their biases and psychology literature indicates one of the left's biases is not accepting innate differences between people too easily). Damore is not some sexist looking to uphold some patriarchical status quo; he is looking for solutions to the gender gap using the scientific literature to back his arguments. --Moobnert (talk) 17:54, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

You're doing my work for me. The good professor outright admitted that yes, the differences are miniscule, and yes, stuff like affirmative action isn't nearly enough to combat discrimination. Contrast that to Damore comparing these programs as trying to level out the number of prisons which is obviously insulting. There might be a discussion for biological differences, but not on Damore's terms where he thinks that women on average can't hack it while using the vague alibi that he knows some really good female programmers without specifying anything beyond that (Do they want full time work or part-time work? Are they actually neurotic or pretty well-tempered? etc.), all the while blowing up biology to a ludicrous degree contradicting his earlier claim that biology is small, and certainly not in this particular context, where racists and sexists can and have used it to popularize their agenda.

And the whole answer with gender egalitarian societies is silly too. You're already implying that women naturally don't have an interest in tech, ignoring that women were commonplace in tech even in "richer" countries like the states back in the day before it became high prestige (that last bit about prestige being something even Damore will agree with) while ignoring that there's still gender discrimination even in the best places. Look at the main article. Beyond how loaded a concept like "gender egalitarian society" is (as compared to the current problems plaguing discrimination, anything that is an improvement can look wonderful by comparison), it's been documented that part-time work is a cultural tradition in the Netherlands and such that influences their thinking, and the main problem that a balance of home/work life often leaves them the short end of the stick when it comes to advancing in the workplace.And men often have shorter paid leave to take care of their families and women face hostile treatment in scientific backgrounds as opposed to men. Naturally even then there is a bias against women in tech.

And uh, when you talk about "complexity of work," that is as damning a statement as one can make. Maybe you aren't sexist but the statement itself is, and it's asinine to think that for whatever reason women can't handle the current tech as well as men, and certainly ridiculous to think that they need some half-assed solution like part-time work or else they can't handle it. Especially at a megacorp like Google, which you think is actually decent and fair at all despite the documented statistics of bias listed on the main article.

PS. Damore is a taint. He saw no problem with being interviewed by the likes of Molyneux and Peterson after being fired, refuses to give any second thought to his absurd notions, to say nothing of his strange statements about the KKK afterwards. He's not a liberal in any sense of the word unless you want to count Camille Paglia and Sam Harris as "liberal", and is advocating for "women's representation in tech," so they have the least advantages imaginable. All the while downplaying societal discrimination and hyping up his own ludicrous theories as the definitive word when it comes to the biology. I don't buy it for a second. That's not even getting into his lawsuit against Google, which no words can adequately capture it's sheer insanity. Man is a first rate concern troll. James Earl Cash (talk) 18:49, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

You're a complete and utter fucking idiot and it's RW editors like you that ultimately discourage me from fixing some of the left-leaning bias found in these articles. You continuously ramble along in your ideological speech and it's pathetic; you also conveniently ignore Dr. Schmitt's vindication of Damore's claims and narrowly focus on the comment of 'small to moderate differences' and you STILL insist Damore made a negative implication about women's abilities in tech when he never did; that all exists in your head, you irrational ideologue. People like you give the left a bad name and people like you are the reason why Trump won the election. You have the radical right, but you also have the radical left alienating their own people on the moderate left because of these stupid incoherent ideological games you play. Now, us rational lefties have to deal with far-left ideologues who are so lost in their ideological ramblings that they don't realize their rhetoric is doing the left's goals a complete disservice. At the very least, thank god Wikipedia is much more balanced and much less prone to ideological rambling. RW is good for strictly scientific topics, but the moment articles involving politics and politicized figures are written, there's too much obvious left wing ideological banter that I get sick of it. But whatever, at least it's not a delusional shithole like Conservapedia, but RW definitely has a long way to go in distinguishing rationality written in a style of snarky banter with leftist ideology.

And by the way, Damore used the prison example to demonstrate that a gender gap isn't always a consequence of discrimination; it's not like the criminal system discriminates against men. There are biological and environmental factors explaining social phenomena, and you refuse to acknowledge biological factors because you're irrational and you deserve no place here as an editor, my honest opinion. But at least you have similar goals as Damore and I to make the work-place more accommodating to women in male-dominated industries such as tech, so that's a start I guess.--Moobnert (talk) 19:51, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

People like me getting Trump elected is like saying that MLK and other activists only made the KKK even more popular. And yes, I would say there is definitely a bias against men when it comes to prisons. Look at studies involving the school to prison pipeline, the active discrimination against marginalized men who are POC. Ah well, at least it didn't take you long to use that stupid both sides rhetoric that was popular in the wake of the Charlottesville attack. I came, I saw, I conquered. James Earl Cash (talk) 20:15, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

It must be hard arguing with people who, in their rant, are convinced about "leftist" bias and accuse you of things you haven't really done (like "conveniently ignoring Dr. Schmitt's vindication" when you addressed it well enough). I don't see any value about this whining Moobnert is doing nor his constant valiant tone of "left-wing bias" as if balance for the sake of balance is good. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 02:13, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

The Gaggle at Google

Not surprisingly, Google does not seem to take diversity seriously beyond its dollars and cents value to the company. Google is currently being sued by an ever increasing number of former employees and for everything from wage inequality and racism to physical assault. It is instructive to see that they have even fired a transgender critic of Damore and, in effect, they have suppressed opinions determined to be too liberal: The following is from Slate,

"Tim Chevalier is an engineer who was fired in November after he had posted left-leaning commentary on Google’s internal message boards, often in opposition to Damore. He characterized the memo as “misogynistic” and contended that “white boys” feel threatened when they aren’t afforded certain privileges. Damore’s suit contains screenshots of a blog post that Chevalier wrote about punching Nazis. Chevalier, who is transgender, alleges in his lawsuit, “Google defines appropriate workplace speech by the standard of what someone with a cisgender, heterosexual, white, male, upper-middle-class background would say.” He further claims that he received censure from superiors and indifference from human resources, which eventually led to his termination."

I find it less than amusing that Chevalier was fired for, among other things, treating others like Mr. Damore with forms of contempt similar to that commonly found in our article. Some account should be given of the many torts currently pending against this corporate Leviathan. Ariel31459 (talk) 02:14, 7 May 2018 (UTC)

It'll be a cold day in hell before anyone says that Google is blameless or innocent. The spying fiasco and collecting cookies in every single search people make is proof of that. And if anything, what you just said is just more fuel to the fire against Damore's argument. Someone of a minority was terminated precisely for being a minority. Look at the stats on the main page where Damore trying to level a lawsuit.

The difference here? Damore is fighting for the ruling class, not the genuinely downtrodden. He has no right to complain, especially when he shat all over diversity programs meant to stop racism. James Earl Cash (talk) 00:07, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Don't be foolish. Damore was not fighting for anything. He is just an autistic engineer who wrote a report. Calm down. We are clean out of torches and pitchforks.Ariel31459 (talk) 23:42, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, when someone makes a lawsuit fighting for white guys over the most specious claims imaginable that don't amount to discrimination in the slightest while he shits on women and POCs, I call it like I see it. James Earl Cash (talk) 23:50, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I thought he filed a lawsuit because he was pissed he lost a good job and didn't understand the reason he was given. Never mind.Ariel31459 (talk) 18:45, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

The Memo

I reviewed what I considered to be the more egregious problems facing the section describing the memo, and so I listed my points below responding to specific quotes. If I can reach some consensus among other RW editors regarding my edit suggestions, I’ll go ahead and edit them.

“This part, however, is probably a later addition from the backlash, though this naked negation alone has made the alt-right recoil in shock and horror at his recanting… nah, they're still there.”

The intention of this sentence is to associate the memo with the alt-right. This is disingenuous as the memo does not argue a proposition that can only be agreed with by those who adhere to alt-right ideology. In case it’s not clear what the proposition of the memo is, it’s this:

“Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

The first part of the proposition is: equal gender representation may in part be hindered by biological causes. This claim can be made by people of varying political beliefs, including those on the left that value diversity. The second part of the proposition is: discrimination (diversity quotas) to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business. I assume this claim is probably more likely to be held by those on the right rather than those on the left. So on the latter note, you might be able to entertain the association of the memo with the alt-right. However, the link is not strong enough to suggest an association of the memo with the alt-right to the readers especially considering the memo made statements that are ideologically in opposition to the exclusive nationalist alt-right ideology (i.e. “I value diversity and inclusion”). The details of the memo don’t show any exclusivity to alt-right ideology. Hence, this sentence should be removed.

“this means women have particular biological personality traits that hinder or at least discourage them in the workplace”

This sentence should be changed to “this means these biological differences “may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”” – It’s important to understand the distinction between the notions ‘biological differences affect the gender gap’ and ‘biological differences affect the gender gap because female biological differences hinder or discourage them in the workplace’ The latter notion is a more specific argument than the former, and the memo never made the argument that specific.

“While Damore makes token appeals that these differences overlap between the sex populations as opposed to strictly confined to one gender, it doesn't take long for him to use his data to undermine goals sought against discrimination towards women at the systemic level, as the implication is that women are biologically this way and there's nothing that can be done about that. “

There’s a lot wrong with this. It suggests to the reader that Damore’s proposition is an attempt to undermine goals sought against systemic discrimination towards women, when Damore clearly stated the proposition is an attempt to explain the gender gap while also adding his view of affirmative action policies as ‘discriminatory’. Framing it as ‘undermining goals sought against discrimination’ is a matter of perspective. If your perspective entails perceiving criticism levied at affirmative action policies as a ‘pro-discrimination’ or ‘against anti-discrimination’ stance, then you will view Damore’s memo as ‘undermining goals sought against discrimination’. However, if your perspective does not entail perceiving criticism levied at affirmative action policies as neither necessarily pro-discrimination nor anti-discrimination, then you wouldn’t consider Damore’s explanation of the gender gap as an attempt to undermine such goals. The latter perspective is more neutral than the former. If Damore doesn’t have a malicious intention to keep the representation of women low or unequal to that of men in tech, then the former perspective shouldn’t be implied to the reader that Damore is trying to ‘undermine goals sought against discrimination’. From a more neutral perspective, he appears to be proposing an alternative means to combat the gender gap, not undermine the means to combat discrimination. Also, it’s a weak interpretation to state the memo implies women are biologically a certain way and that there’s ‘nothing that can be done about that’ if the memo essentially sought to bridge the gender gap, which tacitly shows the memo argues something can be done about that. Hence, I would edit this paragraph to state:

“Damore clarifies many of these differences “are small and there’s significant overlap” and goes on to argue that these differences have an unequal outcome effect on the gender gap.”

“Likewise, these findings are true in only the most banal sense, ignoring that much of scientific literature has recognized that there is a difference between genders but has downplayed their significance overall.[12]”

This sentence should be removed as it does not provide any extra information other than rephrasing the claim that the differences between genders “are small and there’s significant overlap” – so there’s no need to repeat that.

“Also, Damore ignores the nature versus nurture problem, as there was also a survey of genders across races, in which the results between white and Asian respondents differed dramatically.[7][8][9][10][11][12] Perhaps then it is not surprising that he would find good company amongst the alt-right.”

I am confused about this paragraph. What survey of genders is being referred to? The references are the same references cited earlier concerning trait personality gender differences. And what does this have to do with the alt-right? I think this paragraph requires some more explanation.

“It gives sweeping generalizations of "the Left" and "the Right" as if those two are some hive mind entities at polar opposites, such as assuming the Left loves to protect the weak and gives protections for women,[1]:2 but has a double standard for men which the memo remarks the idea that men as "biologically dispensable".”

The description of the left and right by the memo is not a ‘sweeping generalization’ because these differences are supported by the scientific literature and thus they’re a useful description when trying to provide a framework to base an argument. If you don’t believe me, then here are a few references on personality and politics, which do not contradict the memo’s description of the left and right:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228984558_Personality_and_Political_Attitudes_Relationships_Across_Issue_Domains_and_Political_Contexts

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/dace/92341dcb7be513e7fc3868db80a7144edbd2.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228194331_The_Big_Five_Personality_Traits_in_the_Political_Arena

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304535770_Personality_Traits_Income_and_Economic_Ideology_Personality_and_Economic_Ideology

So I would clarify with references where the memo derives its description of left and right differences and biases.

“Although it has been claimed that much of the data in the memo is "suspect, outdated or has other problems",[17]”

I argue the viewpoint of the article by ref. 17 (Recode article) should not be mentioned nor referenced because the article doesn’t adequately address the memo’s proposition. In fact, the Recode article strawmans the memo:

“A Google engineer who was fired for posting an online claim that women’s biology makes them less able than men to work in technology jobs”

The memo never claimed “biology makes [women] less able than men to work in technology jobs”. The memo claimed biology is in part a cause to the gender gap, or as the memo puts it, “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” So the article strawmans the memo from the beginning. Not only that, the article makes inaccurate claims concerning the scientific literature:

“But Baron-Cohen’s study had major problems. It was an “outlier” study. No one else has replicated these findings, including Baron-Cohen himself. It is so flawed as to be almost meaningless.”

This is wrong. Several studies indicate behavioral effects induced by pre-natal androgen balances. This study in 1992 suggested similar conclusions Baron-Cohen made prior to Baron-Cohen’s research:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237560821_Early_Androgens_Are_Related_to_Childhood_Sex-Typed_Toy_Preferences

This one from 2011:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51234997_Gendered_Occupational_Interests_Prenatal_Androgen_Effects_on_Psychological_Orientation_to_Things_Versus_People

Here’s another from 2016, just a year before the Google memo controversy:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292670960_Prenatal_androgen_exposure_alters_girls'_responses_to_information_indicating_gender-appropriate_behaviour

These findings don’t contradict Baron-Cohen’s body of work concluding fetal testosterone predicts sexually differentiated childhood behavior in girls and in boys:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/prenatal-testosterone-mind

So the Recode article is misinformed. If you can’t address the memo’s proposition without strawmming it nor report on the science properly, then you shouldn’t have a place on RW as a reference. Also, the Recode article stated the memo’s references were “suspect, outdated or has other problems” when that directly contradicts previous statements made on this RW article where it states the scientific claims used by the memo were “well-established in the scientific literature” and “all but two of the scientific articles cited in the memo belong to journals ranked in the first quartile of their fields” – that is in no way compatible with calling it ‘suspect, outdated or...other problems’.

“The issue within the memo, however, is how Damore interprets the results of the studies.”

This is wrong. Damore interpreted the results of the studies he referenced just fine, and this is confirmed by many scientists including David P. Schmitt. The issue with the memo is the attempt at explaining the gender gap in tech using biological differences and the argument against affirmative action policies. The reason why this is an issue is because some people believe the gender gap in tech is mostly a consequence of discrimination or socialization of females to not pursue tech-related careers, and to argue the gender gap to be caused by something else, especially something more ‘innate’ like biology, is regarded as a means to belittle the significance and effect of discrimination or socialization, or worse, a means to justify and promote discrimination. Arguing against affirmative action policies are also an issue if you regard them as a relevant means to combat discrimination. So instead of saying the issue is with how Damore interprets the results of the studies, which is wrong, the sentence should instead say something like:

“The issues and concerns people raise about the memo is its claim of the gender gap being caused by biological factors and its argument against affirmative action policies.” --Moobnert (talk) 15:24, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

Let's hope this goes more smoothly this time. I like doing this despite our earlier spat and I hope this both defuses the tensions and gives anyone else who weighs in a good idea on where to go on.

1. The alt-right: He casually chatted with them after being fired and has refused to rebuke them to the extent they deserve given who they are. I don't think that he is actually alt-right, but he is far more friendly with them than anyone should be, and he made weird statements about the KKK. You're essentially demanding that we ignore an elephant in the room despite all the red flags that should be going up on anyone's radar to the point that we give him credit for what little he gets right at the expense of ignoring everything he gets wrong. It gets worse when he cites Warren Ferrell, who has said that date rape used to be playing hard to get, brain-dead "journalism" like the New York Post and an anti-feminist like Christina Hoff Sommers who thinks that boob and ass grabbing in the workplace isn't the same as rape so people like Al Franken should be forgiven. Trying to deny an agenda here is ridiculous.

2. The premise of women being suited to the workplace vs the premise of biological differences cause gender differences: He may claim that he wants equality and that the differences are "minor," but he immediately steps back and resorts to stereotypes of women being neurotic and needing part-time work to function in the tech environment as opposed to full-time work. You're assuming that we must take his words at face value and never question his intentions, even though he contradicted himself already in his memo. Which brings me onto...

3. Damore's REAL intentions: Affirmative action being discriminatory is not a matter of "perspective," the same way his policies trying to help women aren't merely a matter of "perspective." Trying to say that they are is flat out bollocks and should be ridiculed as such, especially when he compares race and gender programs to trying to get the number of women in prison on par with men. People of different races and gender ARE underrepresented at Google, and trying to fix that is being a decent human being. But his solutions explicitly involve treating women differently than men for some arbitrary definition of equality in tech which is practically rules lawyering when it upholds cliches of neurotic women who need to be with people and given more time off because they can't succeed in the same roles as men, instead of actual equality that cuts past discrimination. The only way you can see otherwise is making a bunch of stereotypes about other races/genders to begin with. And that's what Damore does, arguing that the differences between the genders are minor, but oh, there's enough of a difference that we have to treat women differently and realize they won't reach equal representation in tech the same as men. This wiki doesn't have to be insanely liberal as you frequently accuse it of being to nip bad reasoning and discriminatory nonsense in the bud at the first opportunity.

4. Banal findings: It's important because he's misrepresenting the data and blowing it the biology to be larger than it actually is. People need to understand this isn't the "scientific and objective" memo that it thinks it is. There's no need to give him mercy in the interests of neutrality.

5. Some of the studies surveying genders quoted by Damore also surveyed races, which showed a disparity between them and the impact of culture as opposed to biology and the difficulty in obtaining any meaningful info from that. Yeah, there is a definite nature/nurture problem here and that alone throws off a good deal of the "findings" in his memo.

6. The left and the right: I already looked at a couple of those studies. The first one was talking about Big Five personality traits as opposed to any of the stereotypes Damore listed. It even admitted that it remained agnostic about some of the conclusions it reached, as a respect for social cohesion could easily go either way to maintaining the status quo while alienating gay marriage or flat out allow gay marriage to help others because that is also a definition of social cohesion. It also said that race and culture allowed for the same Big Five traits in blacks that were represented differently in whites. So there's another problem. The second and third articles aren't even available. I tried getting into an account with ResearchGate, but as soon as I said that I was just a nobody who liked research, it just redirected me to the search bar. Even requesting the text requires me to prove my credentials. So I don't know where you're going with this, but even from the abstracts, they just talked about Big Five traits as opposed to anything Damore said.

Another problem that you didn't list is Damore's commentary on the end of it. That a more left company would be far too trusting of it's competitors and being ashamed of it's core business (that latter one really gets me), while the one to the right would be overly hierarchical and untrusting of others. Yeah, these are some of the most cliche traits one can think of.

7: Recode article: Why not try debunking the article itself instead of throwing it away? It has actual science that disagrees with him and you're going to get rid of it just like that. Besides, that's not the only article that has taken issue with Damore's findings. Actual scientists he quoted have stepped up and publicly denounced his findings.

re: the Baron-Cohen article. Again, lots of the studies that supposedly agree with them are inaccessible. Definitely not gonna buy a book just for the sake of this argument either. That's not cool at all using what are essentially dead links as backing for your argument. Not to mention, some of the abstracts on the people vs things bit don't go into detail about their findings, about how well they agree with Baron-Cohen or Damore's premises in general. I still think Damore is twisting it out of proportion, like saying exercise is good, so let's go all the way and promote roids. It's funny you want to eliminate leftist bias and create scientific objectivity but flinch or outright ignore at anything contradicting the narrative you're presenting. Especially when it tends to be actual science. Getting rid of the Recode article based on such flimsy reasons is flat out ridiculous. Besides, the article said the data he uses is suspect, not the references themselves. There is absolutely no reason to take it down.

The other thing is, that it's hard to nearly impossible to extrapolate any solid conclusions from the people vs things dichotomy for this current context of the workplace discussion when supposed differences have been already said to be minor at best and as we'll see in the next point...

8: Damore didn't misrepresent science: Yeah he did. You already brought up Schmitt on this talk page earlier, and he actually said that Damore's findings that attempt to evaluate the totality of personality based on gender alone were like using an axe to operate on someone, saying that applying cross-cultural differences to the Google workplace isn't effective at all. Nevermind that Schmitt supports affirmative action policies and admits that there are definite socioeconomic barriers to women in tech, only conceding to discussion of biology in the workplace under the right context (as you know racists and sexists can and will try and hijack that conversation) but you're still willing to try and make that about "perspective," yet on everything related to Damore, you refuse to relent and chalk up the criticism to leftist bias. This isn't a matter of opinion, and you trying to argue that discrimination isn't as systemic as people think just because, as if the notion is absurd in itself while ignoring all the intellectual landmines that Damore has stepped on, to say nothing of how you meet every substantial challenge and salient point by parroting the same tired debunked arguments again ad nauseum is more frustrating than anything. James Earl Cash (talk) 23:02, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

How do you know science was misrepresented? I have found a number of statements by real scientists stating Damore is more or less correct in the main. If other scientists agree with you, then it is debatable and not settled as you seem to insist. Why should anyone depend on your opinion then?Ariel31459 (talk) 17:30, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Fer cryin out loud...

First of all, there are a number of scientific articles on the main page that say, yes, he misrepresented the science and I'm not going to do a PRATT thing with this because you being deliberately obtuse for the nth time is just tiresome. The other thing is the scientists in that Quillette article don't exactly verify Damore. The first scientist Jussim compared being called a racial slur back in the 60s to being called a bigot in the present day and said they're the same thing. That isn't exactly helping. Nevermind that he admits he actually doesn't know if Damore is right about the Google workplace or not and just assumes so simply because the memo got some things right about science, so oh, the rest is probably true as well! That is something that is far from a resounding commendation in the slightest! Besides that, he also co-authored a bullshit racist piece with Jonathan Haidt that affirmative is a problem because it's not perfect and it leads to "them damn uppity blacks and Mexicans are having their feelings hurt from microaggressions." This ain't someone I'm looking to take advice from and more likely than not has an agenda.

The other three inclusions being proposed as scientific support of Damore are asinine too. They include the Schmitt guy, whose response has already been covered far too many times already in this talk page. The third guy Miller doesn't even understand why diversity programs are in place and makes the idiotic and inhumane assumption that if everyone is the same, then there's no reason for people to fill quotas of underrepresented people, and veers closely into HBD territory when he outright says that there are probably differences in the brains of various ethnicities, concluding that Damore is right because everyone can't be equal so let's promote some outdated policies that sort people and ironically enough make them more distant than ever. Soh doesn't bother to give any credence to the thing besides blindly agreeing with it, while ignoring Damore's idiotic recommendations to fix inequality, which let's be honest, are the real reason that everyone took up arms against him in the first place.

Then again, you never miss a chance to concern troll and derail the conversation as much as possible when the evidence against you is insurmountable. Using a piece from a shithole like Quillette is the nail in the coffin. James Earl Cash (talk) 22:48, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

There are many scientists who comment that Damore is about right. Your response: they can't be trusted. Why? That's up to you. It doesn't matter to everyone else. Steven Pinker is another scientist who does not think Damore is very wrong on the science. I claim that it all seems debatable. Certainly a software engineer isn't going to please you with his bedside manner. Why is that a problem for you? You can believe what you like. I Just wouldn't call it science.The kind of consensus as exists among scientists for climate change does not exist among scientists on this topic.Ariel31459 (talk) 00:25, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

This isn't some both sides issue where the answer is some cliche middle ground. Every single scientific article that I've seen "support" Damore don't comment on his outlandish policies about emphasizing part-time work as opposed to full time work or his agenda against anti-discrimination policies, a man who is suing Google for "viewpoint discrimination." They comment on the science, which everyone admits is true, just with the caveat that the differences are minor. Damore's insistences otherwise to the level that he'll recommend shutting down anti-discrimination policies and thinks we need to have archaic gender role stuff is misrepresenting the science right there! That is what people are taking issue with. Not his findings, but the lengths he thinks people need to go with those findings. And that link is just something that chastises Pichai for surrendering to the mob, whatever that means. Figures that your latest link involving a scientist like Pinker doesn't give an opinion worth any weight.

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 Here's another link I intend to add to the main piece. Let's recommend women have pair work because they have an interest in people vs things huh? Even though working together is a standard requirement of tech jobs? Damore is full of shit.

PS. Steven Pinker is a fucking idiot. He downplays all of the ills of the world every time and for someone who recommends enlightenment virtues, explicitly targets intellectuals for rightly perceiving the problems of today, because that's not cool maaaaaaaaaan. Not a surprise then that he would refuse to take any actively political role and instead say something that would refuse to offend anyone while serving his public persona. James Earl Cash (talk) 01:34, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

Now that says it all. Perhaps video games is your thing? You would get to shoot imaginary villains over and over.Ariel31459 (talk) 01:42, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

This is the man whom our intelligent friend thinks is a "fucking idiot": Currently Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, taught at Stanford and MIT, directed the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Won the Troland Prize from NAS and prizes from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Received several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice, Humanist of the Year, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” ^{— Unsigned, by: Ariel31459 / talk / contribs}

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Apropos of @Ariel31459, it would be best to avoid ad hominem attacks and be more specific about your criticisms of Pinker, @James Earl Cash. Credentials don't make a person right, but they should generally be a good reason to pay attention to them at least. Bongolian (talk) 18:07, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

More than anything, I take issue with Ariel using Pinker in this debate when he's barely relevant.

This is gonna be on my soapbox, so feel free to skip as again, we are getting into vastly different territory than Damore and the memo, but re: Pinker's success? Sorry, but I'm not willing to give any credence to a man who says, "Things today are just so GREAT!" to the point that he'll downplay the severity of climate change, colonialism, the fact that there are more slaves today than any other point in history, how humanity today is running off other species at an alarming rate, the rise of dictators and wannabe dictators worldwide and how when confronted, becomes ridiculously anti-intellectual despite being a product of the academy. Those awards mean nothing when faced with such flaws, especially in light of his shoddy defenses against said criticisms. Nor am I willing to kowtow to a bunch of name dropping. The politics of these insitutions favors certain people no matter who actually works hardest, and that's especially more evident in the case of the Ivy League and others. You don't ever hear about amazing professors at podunk universities nobody has ever heard of, you pay attention to the big names in the highest corners, and I'm willing to bet Pinker with all his fame and the institutional support that insulates his reputation on a daily basis has coasted on the success of the adjunct professors and interns under him more than once, at his best giving them credit, but certainly not with the same glory he takes for himself. After awhile it becomes practically taboo to criticize such people while they can be free to collect future success without any substantial talk to the contrary whether it's slander or actually a critique of merit that would upend said famous person. MLK's message taught today is a watered down abomination of what he actually believed and taught but he's more popular than ever, this fake message shutting down the truth of his legacy. But when he was alive, preaching his real message and fighting off inequality? He wasn't so popular back then. Look at the meat, not the gravy.

If anything, all of Pinker's awards, especially in the context of one man who takes so much prestige for himself and his reputation built as such, are more of a red flag than proof he's worth listening to. Certainly when used as something to try and excuse his failures. It's akin to saying that Jordan Peterson should be forgiven for his h-index score, ignoring his quite frankly bizarre dissertation, how his psychology tests when used in the courtroom were found to be an embarrassment and thrown out, and all his absolutely fun activities in the present day.

And Ariel, sign your posts. James Earl Cash (talk) 18:54, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

This has been quite an episode of homespun soapbox equivocation. If you want to contradict and defame any distinguished scientist who holds a view inconsistent with your own, you can do so. Just don't expect to be taken seriously by serious people. As for Peterson, I do not believe he could do anything that you would find agreeable. This is not Peterson's talk page. Why not try to focus on one idea at a time?Ariel31459 (talk) 22:09, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

You are truly lost, aren't you? James Earl Cash (talk) 03:30, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

The only one here who has lost the plot is not me.Ariel31459 (talk) 04:07, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

For the record, I think you're really dense, Ariel. I prolly shouldn't insult but that James Earl Cash has thoroughly explained why he doesn't like Pinker and you just resort to "how dare you insult an authority figure with 'prestige'", it's really hard not to be frustrated at this point. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 01:59, 28 May 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash **RIDICULOUSLY LONG RESPONSE** - Tried to shorten it but I couldn’t without sacrificing the various points I’m about to make to you, as well as explaining the changes that I will be making to the article. If you choose not to read it, then at the very least I suggest you give this blog your attention because it directly addresses the most relevant aspect of this conversation to me, which is science and the scientific literature, by reviewing meta-analyses relevant to the memo’s claims and clearly outlines findings generally supporting the memo and findings generally opposing it. It does a better job at making the point I’m trying to make to you regarding the scientific accuracy of the memo’s claims. If nothing else, consider this source. The source concludes:

“In conclusion, based on the meta-analyses we reviewed and the research on the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis, Damore is correct that there are “population level differences in distributions” of traits that are likely to be relevant for understanding gender gaps at Google and other tech firms. The differences are much larger and more consistent for traits related to interest and enjoyment, rather than ability. This distinction between interest and ability is important because it may address  one of the main fears raised by Damore’s critics: that the memo itself will cause Google employees to assume that women are less qualified, or less “suited” for tech jobs, and will therefore lead to more bias against women in tech jobs. But the empirical evidence we have reviewed should have the opposite effect. Population differences in interest and population differences in variability of abilities may help explain why there are fewer women in the applicant pool, but the women who choose to enter the pool are just as capable as the larger number of men in the pool. This conclusion does not deny that various forms of bias, harassment, and discouragement exist and may contribute to outcome disparities, nor does it imply that the differences in interest are biologically fixed and cannot be changed in future generations. If our three conclusions are correct then Damore was drawing attention to empirical findings that seem to have been previously unknown or ignored at Google, and which might be helpful to the company as it tries to improve its diversity policies and outcomes.“ 

https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/

Onto my response.

Regarding the association of Damore with the alt-right, your points were: 1. He was friendly and casually chatted with them 2. He refused to rebuke them “to the extent they deserve” 3. He made weird statements about the KKK.

1. The best way to settle this talking point is to agree on defining the alt-right so we can determine who exactly these supposed alt-right figures are that Damore chatted with. According to Wikipedia, the alt-right is a somewhat ill-defined grouping of far-right hate groups; white supremacy, Nazism, anti-Semitism and racism are notable themes. The guy who promoted the term is Richard Spencer, who is clearly a far-right white supremacist. Damore did not speak with Spencer; if he did, your argument would be more credible and I wouldn’t try arguing against it. Instead, some of the people Damore spoke to after his firing were Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Are these alt-right figures? All of these people have been labeled alt-right by many, particularly left-leaning sources. The trick here is to figure out if that is an accurate characterization or not. Using wikipedia’s definition of alt-right, we can assess the validity of claiming these figures as such.

Is Peterson alt-right? His views do not share the tenets of white supremacy, Nazism, anti-Semitism and racism because he has criticized and denounced these tenets. His own viewpoints of criticizing identity politics and emphasizing the individual is not conducive to alt-right ideology, which frequently emphasizes white nationalism. Hence, he is more accurately regarded as a psychologist with socially conservative viewpoints, not alt-right.

Rogan is not alt-right because he does not express alt-right ideology. Some people think him giving a platform to (alleged) alt-right figures is in and of itself a direct association with the alt-right, and so they label him as alt-right regardless. The problem with this argument is Rogan platforms people of all views, including those incongruent with alt-right ideology. Providing a platform to various viewpoints does not mean you associate with those viewpoints. Rogan is just an open-minded podcast host who platforms a wide variety of people and viewpoints. So he’s not alt-right either.

Shapiro is far-right in many of his views, however he frequently criticizes the alt-right (he defines them as white supremacists) and denounces their racist viewpoints. Plus, he’s Jewish and doesn’t appreciate alt-right anti-Semitism. He was however an editor on Breitbart for some years, and Breitbart is an alt-right haven. However, the audience of Breitbart does not necessarily define all “journalists” on there in terms of their hateful beliefs. Shapiro’s time there as an editor doesn’t suddenly mean he is a white supremacist who sees western society as a product of white race ingenuity and immigrants as a threat to that. Despite some of his far-right views on various issues (Israel, transgenderism, etc.), he does not fit the hate-group themes of the alt-right. The already ill-defined alt-right is difficult to pin on Shapiro given these considerations.

Yiannopoulos has a Jewish background and is married to a black man. So he’s doubtfully anti-Semitic or a white supremacist. However, he’s heavily associated with the alt-right, likely due to his documented collaboration with actual white supremacists and neo-nazis for Breitbart, and the fact that he says things about transgenders and gays that are arguably in line with hate-group themes of homophobia. In terms of views on race, he is not a white supremacist to my knowledge because I’ve found no evidence of him discussing race realism or superiority of any race; I haven’t observed him frame his talking points from the perspective of race. He talks frequently about Western values, which can be shared by anyone, so race doesn’t appear to shape his talking points much at all. However, I think there’s enough criteria to argue him to be an alt-right figure given the present hate-group theme of trans/homophobia.

Molyneux has been described as alt-right by Politico, Metro, NY Magazine, Vanity Fair, and CBS. However, Molyneux says he does not identify with the alt-right movement. It is not clear to me if I could consider him an alt-right figure since I don’t watch enough of his content (I saw the little I needed to conclude he’s an ideologue whom falsely convinced himself his worldviews are evidence-based), but he doesn’t seem to share the aforementioned hate themes as far as I know. I’m aware he discusses race and IQ, but discussion in and of itself doesn’t make you alt-right or racist. If that’s how alt-right is defined, then I would also be defined as a racist alt-righter as well and that wouldn’t make any sense considering I’m of mixed race and come from a Caribbean island where 2% of the population is white. It’s not clear to me how Molyneux’s views relate to alt-right hate themes, but for the sake of argument we can just call him alt-right.

So you have Damore’s association with Yiannopolous and Molyneux; these are the figures I can concede to be alt-right. So your argument is: because Damore was friendly and casually chatted with them, you associate Damore with the alt-right. My argument is: Based on all the platforms and the pattern of platforms utilized (including which platform did and didn't grant an interview), have you not considered Damore just utilized these large platforms to garner a larger audience for expressing his views? This is often an advantage over making your own video because an audience is already established through other channels. I try to put myself in Damore’s shoes to judge whether people associating me with the alt-right makes any sense simply because I spoke to well-known Youtubers to increase my outreach. If I was in Damore’s shoes and spoke to Yiannopoulos and Molyneux and people associated me with the alt-right, I would find that completely inconducive to my viewpoints. I’m not white, I’m not right-wing, and all political spectrum tests I’ve taken place me as center-left liberal. Yet, merely chatting with people associated with the alt-right will make some people, like you, to associate me with it. This is a cop-out of an argument. Associating someone with the alt-right would be a wrong perspective to have if they shared little to no ideological overlap with the alt-right. I can easily imagine the same situation occurring for Damore. He may very well share no alt-right views, yet people will associate him with it, and once people do that, they dismiss the individual all together. Hence, I realize how little practical utility it is to associate an individual with the alt-right just because he utilized large Youtube platforms hosted by right-wingers. That’s potentially damaging the reputation of individuals whose viewpoints are not even congruent to alt-right ideology.

The point is, while people associate an individual with the alt-right, that individual could have entirely contrasting views to the alt-right, and if that individual’s views truly contrast theirs then associating that individual with them would be a mistake because it implies to readers that the individual shares alt-right viewpoints and such inaccuracy can be easily overlooked. So that’s my response to your points of Damore “casually chatting with them” and “is friendly with them”. A leftie could casually chat and be friendly with alt-right associates. That doesn’t mean you can genuinely associate the leftie with the alt-right.

2. Damore has rebuked the alt-right. He denounced their views and stated he does not share his views with them. However, your point was that he hasn’t rebuked them “to the extent they deserve”. Well, what exactly should have Damore done in order for you to determine that he has rebuked them sufficiently enough as to not associate Damore with them? For me, denouncing their views is enough. I’m not going to expect or demand someone to take it further than that because I know if I was in their shoes, I wouldn’t take it further than that at all. I would casually denounce it, and if people think my denouncing wasn’t ‘serious enough’ I would just dismiss them because I couldn’t possibly take alt-right accusations levied at me seriously at all. The absurdity of a situation like that gets to me, and so I will not second guess someone’s intentions when they denounce the alt-right unless they do something really suspect, and Damore hasn’t done anything suspect other than be a 3edgy5me nerdy programmer. I regard much of the alt-right labelling going around for various figures to be a product of left-wing hysteria. Unfortunately, RW suffers quite a bit from the alt-right label casually thrown around.

3. I find your consistent bashing on Damore for his KKK comments to be too silly to provide any credence. ‘Grand imperial wizard’ sounds like a hilarious Dungeons n Dragons name to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m not American that I don’t immediately associate casual off-color remarks about KKK titles like ‘grand wizard’ with racism or ‘a possible insight into the mind of a racist’. I associate it with “oh look, a 3edgy5me nerdy programmer finds ‘grand wizard’ from the KKK to be a cool Dungeons n Dragons name. That’s hilarious. Oh look here as well, people are royally upset about his tweet and think it implies something sinister. People can be hysterical sometimes. And grand wizard does actually sound pretty funny. Oh, you silly americans and your twitter fights.”

Here were your claims regarding women and the workplace: 1. Damore immediately steps back and resorts to stereotypes of women being neurotic and needing-part-time work to function in the tech environment 2. he contradicted himself in the memo.

1. Look, this should be clear. We are never going to get anywhere in our discussion if you cannot distinguish what is written in the scientific literature from stereotypes. It’s not like there’s any evidence Damore went looking specifically for trait neuroticism. He didn’t even argue neuroticism was a factor in the Google workplace; it was just one of several personality traits listed displaying a gender difference. It’s not like psychologists went looking for neuroticism specifically either above all other personality traits. All personality traits are investigated. The one’s displaying a gender difference was elaborated on in the memo. Trait neuroticism is among them. It’s really that simple Regarding the data itself: when cross-cultural data is analyzed and show a consistent pattern, you can’t claim that the differences found between men and women are a result of stereotypes, or that recognizing population distributions is stereotyping. You can stereotype people based on these scientific findings if you wanted to, however these scientific findings are not stereotypes in and of themselves. Damore’s mentioning of the scientific findings in his memo is not an action of stereotyping women. What kind of claim is that even. They’re just findings of gender differences in psychology literature. That’s it.

You can acknowledge scientific findings without stereotyping people. Even David P. Schmitt said “sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth”. Neuroticism and agreeableness are personality traits that show larger differences compared to other traits.

So please, don’t argue to me again that elaborating on the scientific literature on gender differences equates to Damore stereotyping women. If the scientific literature found no differences in neuroticism between men and women cross-culturally, then that wouldn’t be included in the memo since the memo was discussing gender differences. Perhaps you think Damore thought “man I can’t stand these neurotic females in my sausage fest of a company, I wonder if I can find scientific literature proving women are more neurotic than men so I can get rid of these affirmative action programs and maintain my manly kingdom.” He was specifically elaborating on gender differences, not arbitrarily chosen personality traits where he can sinisterly take a jab at women for ****ing up his precious white male conservative work life.

Damore never said women need part-time work to function in the tech environment. The memo states “women on average look for a more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average” and “Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.” In your mind, this implies women can’t keep up in tech full-time like men because they’re inferior. In my mind and the minds of people who I would argue read in context, this implies women (or men and women for that matter) who tend towards a work/life balance can consider Google employment a more favorable option if that option is conducive to a preferred work/life balance (i.e. part-time work). I’m honestly not sure sometimes how some people read the memo and think “wow this guy thinks women are too neurotic and family-oriented to work in tech? What a misogynist!” like virtually all left-wing articles I read on it. Also, Damore has stated his girlfriend is a self-described feminist working in tech who expressed disagreement with the memo, so I really find these sexism/alt-right claims levied at him as just…well, I shouldn’t use flame war words with you anymore, so let’s just say I find these claims a little over the top.

2. As far as I can tell you did not explain where he contradicted himself in the memo and therefore I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Your claims regarding Damore’s “real” intentions: 1. affirmative action being discriminatory is not a matter of perspective 2. Damore’s policies trying to help women isn’t a matter of perspective 3. comparing affirmative action programs for women in tech to trying to get more women into prison has no appropriate context 4. women are underrepresented at Google, and trying to fix that is being a decent human being (I assume you consider this to be the only viable perspective) 5. Damore’s solutions explicitly involve treating women differently than men

1. Yes, affirmative action being discriminatory is a matter of perspective. Affirmative action discriminates against the majority in favor of the minority, potentially sacrificing competence in cases of the ‘minority’ candidate being less competent than the ‘majority’ candidate. The hierarchy of hiring practices is fundamentally competence. Hence, the more competent applicant gets the job. Under affirmative action, you create a possible situation where the most competent applicant does not get the job and the job is instead given to a less competent applicant because they meet a superficial requirement of being part of a particular race or gender. Hence, you are discriminating against the highest competent applicants in some instances simply because they represent a majority group. This is a viable perspective on affirmative action.

The problem with the word ‘discrimination’ is that people tend to only consider its definition as its negative connotation in social affairs, i.e. discriminate against someone for being black. However, discrimination in a more broad sense that is neither positive nor negative in connotation is recognizing difference between things and choosing (or omitting) something (discriminating against all other choices) based on your recognition of those differences. Virtually all actions and hierarchies utilize discrimination (selection based on recognized differences). For example, universities discriminate based on academic performance among other things for applicants. Companies discriminate based on competence and strength of the application. The most competent applicants get the job; the least competent applicants are discriminated against for job positions.

This is a neutral use of the word, but it’s still applicable because all individuals and organizations discriminate in all situations based on some metric. If that metric isn’t race or gender or something similar, then people don’t see it as discrimination as the word is conventionally used, but it is still a type of discrimination. Please don’t confuse this definition with the conventional view of discrimination under social affairs (racism, transphobia, etc.). So yes, affirmative action being discriminatory IS a matter of perspective, it’s not just a black-and-white matter of “only racism and sexism is discrimination” and you disallowing the nuance of discriminating against ‘most competent’ applicants for ‘minority applicants’ needlessly narrows and oversimplifies the conversation.

Personally, I don’t immediately denounce affirmative action policies. I certainly don’t mind and even encourage the minority applicant to be chosen over the majority applicant if both applications are equally as strong. I do have some issue with choosing less competent applications over more competent ones in order to mitigate minority representations on something as superficial as skin color and gender. I suppose if the minority applicant isn’t as strong as the majority applicant but the difference is not significant, then I don’t see a problem choosing them over the majority applicant in that instance either.

2. Damore’s policies trying to help women is also a matter of perspective. What Damore did is exactly the same thing I would do if I was approached hypothetically and asked to solve the ‘problem’ of the gender gap in tech. The first thing I would do is determine how people end up in tech in general. This is a combination of ability and interest; the interested applicants with tech abilities end up in tech as a general rule. I would then review how men and women orient themselves in the job market. Since I’m solving the gender gap, I would review literature on gender differences as well. Then I would list possible causes to the gender gap. I would also compare the male/female ratio of computer science graduates with the ratio in computer science-related jobs. For example, if 50% of tech-related graduates were women yet only 25% were found in tech jobs, I would indeed find that very suspect and would be quick to postulate that a result of discrimination, however that is not the case. The number of female graduates with computer science degrees is roughly the same as the number of females working computer science-related jobs. Furthermore, I would consult the literature, examine cross-cultural studies, compare the tech gender gap in countries to each other using The Global Gender Gap Report to determine their ranking in developing gender equality in society. Since we don’t see the gender gap reduce in countries scoring the highest on gender equality, in fact we see the gender gap growing larger in various employment positions, you can postulate that the gender gap increasing for countries scoring highest on gender equality are a consequence of men and women being more free in these societies to pursue their own interests. Or in other words, as this APA study argues, “The present study suggests that interests may play a critical role in gendered occupational choices and gender disparity in the STEM fields.”:

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Men-and-things-women-and-people-A-meta-analysis-of-sex-differences-in-interests.pdf

Hence, Damore and I would research and reason quite similarly in our personal approaches to reducing the gender gap, assuming I was assigned such a task. So I strongly argue Damore’s solutions to the gender gap is a matter of perspective. The perspective of sexist discrimination would lead you to considering affirmative action policies as part of the solution to the gender gap. That’s also fine, since the gender gap is expectedly a multivariate equation and discrimination is a factor, but you must understand this perspective isn’t any more worthy or valid than the one Damore argues for. There are many things that contribute to a gender gap, and psychology literature strongly suggests gender differences significantly affect the gender gap. Discrimination has been shown in studies to be a factor as well, however the degree to which it affects the gender gap is not as high as other factors. Of course, the social constructionists are not keen on such conclusions Damore, me, and many others come to because they don’t want to believe men and women are different enough to cause an observable gender gap. They tend to believe any differences are a matter of social construction, otherwise men and women wouldn’t be any different. They would then go on to argue these countries scoring highest in the gender gap report are still heavily entrenched in cultural conditioning in conventional gender roles and thus no country on earth (not a single one!) is a valid example of gender equality that is significant enough to quantify how the genders will orient themselves across the employment market in a gender egalitarian society. That’s probably the best way to dismiss the argument, by saying “our currently most gender egalitarian-leaning societies are still saturated with sexism and pressuring the sexes in upholding stereotypical gender roles, therefore you can’t say the gender gap increased in these countries due to difference of interest between men and women.” So yes, Damore’s input on bridging the gender gap is a matter of perspective due to the multivariate nature of the gender gap, and it’s valid.

3. Comparing the gender gap in tech to the gender gap in prisons is completely appropriate in context if you concede there are differences between men and women and those differences will manifest as gender gaps in the real world. That’s the whole point of the comparison. Can differences between men and women cause gender gaps in i.e. job choice, prison population? Of course. You couldn’t rationally expect no difference in the gender ratio in job choice or prison if gender differences are known. Is the gender gap in prison where 92% of prisoners are men a consequence of gender socialization and gender discrimination? I think you’d have to be daft to argue that point. It should be obvious that the prison population isn’t 50/50 male to female because there are differences between men and women affecting their likelihood to end up in prison. I hope I wouldn’t have to explain why that is or what the relevant differences are, I expect you can figure it out. However I can see the comparison to prisons rubs some people’s sensibilities the wrong way. Let’s take another example then: compare the gender gap in tech to the gender gap of brick and cement masons. According to the U.S Department of Labor, 100% of these job positions are held by men:

https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm

Are you really going to try and argue that this 100% male dominated job is a consequence of discrimination? I couldn’t ever try to argue that. It is preposterous to suggest the brick and cement mason industries are ruthlessly preventing women from working these jobs. Could it be the simple fact that women on average just don’t want to choose these jobs? Could it be their interests are not conducive to orienting themselves towards having such jobs? That sounds like a much more reasonable explanation than chalking it all up to discrimination. I stress this point once more: gender gaps are not always a consequence of discrimination. At best, a gender gap is a multivariate equation with multiple factors affecting it, and discrimination is probably not the most dominating factor in that equation with respect to Google.

4. Women are underrepresented at Google, and trying to fix that is being a decent human being. On the surface, that seems reasonable, but it’s only reasonable if you believe that the reason women are underrepresented is due to discrimination. If you don’t believe it’s due to discrimination, and you believe it’s rather a consequence of free choice, then what is there to fix? If men and women are free to choose what they want to do, I don’t see the point in socially engineering to bridge the gender gap if the population distributions tailoring men and women to do tech jobs like Google is different. Psychology literature already shows men and women have different averages in interest, so if you’re like Damore or me and you regard the gender gap to be more a result of free choice, then you wouldn’t necessarily find anything to fix with free choice. You’d just let it be as is.

5. I disagree that Damore’s solutions is treating women differently than men. If anything, affirmative action policies treat women differently than men because being a female applicant subverts the otherwise dominant hiring criteria of competence for a more superficial criteria of meeting some diversity quota. To lend a little credence to anecdote, my relative has been working at Schlumberger for 30+ years and they’ve similarly instantiated gender quotas for hiring some decades back. I was told when men chose to quit the job, the process was rather quick and normal, but if a woman chose to resign, the company would spend significant effort asking if anything can be done to improve their time at Schlumberger and reconsider their resignation. I’m not saying this is bad or anything, but it gives context as to my views on this. I think these affirmative action policies inherently intends to treat the target individual of their diversity quotas differently, whereas Damore provided Google workplace suggestions to bridge the gender gap. None of his suggestions seemed to treat women differently, unless he meant i.e. that only women are afforded part-time work and men are disallowed this option at Google. That would be an example of treating them differently. Instead of regarding Damore’s solutions as “treating them differently”, it’s better thought of as “transforming the Google work place as to make it more appealing for women in an effort to bridge the gender gap”.

Here were your points on ‘banal findings’: 1. Damore misrepresenting the data and blowing up the biology to be larger than it actually is.

1. No, he did not misrepresent the data. There are differences between men and women as the literature clearly states. Damore pointing that out is not a misrepresentation. He is also not blowing the biology to be larger than it actually is. To claim the gender gap in tech is caused in part by innate interest in choosing such a career is not a misrepresentation of data; its an argument based on the data. The data itself has not been misrepresented at all in any way. The data shows gender differences and it shows most personality traits are small to moderate (<10% variance) in size (although some gender differences such as interest are larger than that). Damore did not contradict these findings in his memo. He stated them as is.

Your points regarding the memo’s characterization of the left and right: 1. The studies didn’t mention the specific stereotypes characterized in the memo, just the big five personality traits 2. Damore’s points about a far-left vs. far-right company are cliché

1. Damore’s memo listed these political biases: compassion for the weak vs. respect for strong/authority, disparities are due to injustices vs. natural and just, humans are inherently cooperative vs. competitive, change is good vs. dangerous, open vs. closed and idealist vs. pragmatic. Hirsh (2010) states regarding compassion vs. respect “According to moral foundations theory (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt & Joseph, 2007), human morality can be summarized by five major domains. Importantly, research using this model has demonstrated that the relative importance of these domains varies between liberals and conservatives. In particular, liberals tend to be more concerned about compassion and justice, whereas conservatives are more concerned about ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Differences in the strength of these underlying motivational systems are thought to influence explicit political attitudes and ideologies.”

Regarding disparities are due to injustices vs. natural and just, Brandt (2017) states “political conservatism is thought to be a belief system predicated on resistance to change and the acceptance of inequality [disparities], strategies that serve as defenses against the experience of threat and uncertainty (Jost et al., 2007). Support for this model has come from both correlational research, in which conservative beliefs are associated with measures of uncertainty avoidance and acceptance of inequality, and experimental manipulations, in which increasing the salience of a threat leads to greater support of conservative values.” Jost (2003) said “The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.” Liberals, conversely, aren’t as accepting of inequality.

Regarding humans are inherently cooperative vs. competitive, deriving competitiveness as a personality trait from conscientiousness (Big Five) maps quite well, particularly when you pair it with high values of extraversion. Conservatives are higher in conscientiousness than liberals. You can think of conscientiousness as having to do with finishing a task no matter what, which leads to a strong desire for achievement. Conversely, an opposite of being competitive is being cooperative.

Regarding change is good vs. dangerous, I really don’t think I need to explain this one directly using a literature quote. It’s quite self-evident the right resists change and the left embraces it. Regarding open vs. closed, one of the fundamental personality traits predicting left or liberal beliefs in psychology literature is openness. Conservatives are low in openness, so the opposite of open is closed.

Regarding idealist vs. pragmatic, I’m not sure what derivation of the Big Five adequately explains these traits with respect to political affiliation, although I remember J. Peterson making these claims regarding the left being more idealistic and right being more pragmatic, and I would trust a psychologist of his standing to be reasonable in making those affiliations, therefore I do not regard Damore mentioning idealism vs. pragmatism as a “sweeping generalization” either since it at least has vindication from a psychologist. I imagine this is a huge red flag for you, but whatever. This is his opinion within his field of expertise, so even a sometimes nutty guy like Peterson is not wrong 100% of the time. For the rest of the memo’s listed points of political bias, it doesn’t deviate substantially from what I could ascertain from the literature. So I would not regard it as “sweeping generalizations” as this does not appreciate the fact that the argument is derived from literature, which is important if you want to stay scientific.

2. A company too far to the right will be too resistant to change because the right resists change, a company too far to the left will change too rapidly and over diversify its interests because the left embraces change. This is just working with theory. The theory is the right resists change, the left embraces it, so if you consider the theory regarding companies, that is how you’d describe them if they go too far right or left. I don’t see anything wrong with Damore’s comment here. Even if it’s not an accurate descriptor of how companies run, it’s still goes along with political theory and the memo is about Google the company anyway.

Regarding the Recode article, here is what you said to me: “Why not try debunking the article itself instead of throwing it away? It has actual science that disagrees with him and you're going to get rid of it just like that.”

Alright, let’s debunk this nonsense. The Recode article strawmans the memo and has nothing to do with the central tenets of the memo. The article states “We have been researching issues of gender and STEM for more than 25 years. We can flatly say that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing at the highest levels in any STEM fields.”

Now let’s compare that to the memo’s claim: “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” I have no clue what the question of the gender gap has to do with the question of women’s capabilities in performing in STEM fields, unless evidence shows women have lesser capabilities performing in STEM fields, which is not evident in any way and there’s evidence to show competence is rather equal among the genders. The memo mentioned nothing in regards to capabilities specifically, or as many people strawman the memo, claim it says women are “less suited” for tech jobs, which was also never said. So effectively the Recode article is answering the question of women’s capabilities in tech, not the gender gap, so it’s research is tailored to explain gender capabilities, not a gender gap, so with that clear in mind let’s keep going.

Recode goes on to state “Many reputable scientific authorities have weighed in on this question, including a major paper in the journal Science debunking the idea that the brains of males and females are so different that they should be educated in single-sex classrooms. The paper was written by eight prominent neuroscientists, headed by professor Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College, past president of the American Psychological Association. They argue that “There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.” My response to this is “oh, that’s great. What the **** does the male/female brain being similar enough as to not necessitate single-sex classrooms have to do with women’s capabilities in tech, or the gender gap for that matter?”

Recode goes on to state “And happily, the widely held belief that boys are naturally better than girls at math and science is unraveling among serious scientists. Evidence is mounting that girls are every bit as competent as boys in these areas. Psychology professor Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has strong U.S. data showing no meaningful differences in math performance among more than seven million boys and girls in grades 2 through 12.” My response is “yeah, makes sense. There are also no average gender differences in IQ. More women are going to university now than men as well. I still don’t know what this narrow focus on gender capabilities has to do with the gender gap in tech though.”

Recode goes on to state “But Baron-Cohen’s study had major problems. It was an “outlier” study. No one else has replicated these findings, including Baron-Cohen himself. It is so flawed as to be almost meaningless.” which is simply a flat-out lie. Recode is attacking Baron-Cohen’s body of research because it effectively refutes their ideologue position that gender differences can explain gender gaps better and more rigorously than just simply discrimination.

For some context since you can’t access these papers, Cohen’s study found boys don’t react to faces as much as girls do; they seem to be more attracted to movement. According to Baron-Cohen, that’s an example of prenatal testosterone-induced differences in people vs. thing processing (he calls it empathizing vs. systemizing). His body of research is quite powerful because he looks at prenatal testosterone levels in fetuses and then later correlates those levels with a variety of observable behaviors. One of them is eye gaze, but also increased prenatal testosterone is associated with increased tendency for rough-and-tumble play and the effects are significant in size. The importance of Cohen’s research is that it’s difficult to associate that effect with a particular socialization explanation.

Recode is either lying or has not properly researched similar studies because Berenbaum (1992) found that “Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) who were exposed to high levels of androgen in the prenatal and early postnatal periods showed increased play with boys toys and reduced play with girls' toys compared with their unexposed female relatives at ages 3 to 8… results suggest that early hormone exposure in females has a masculinizing effect on sex-typed toy preferences.”

Beltz (2011) found that “We explored the contribution of sex hormones to career-related interests, in particular studying whether prenatal androgens affect interests through psychological orientation to Things versus People. We examined this question in individuals with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), who have atypical exposure to androgens early in development, and their unaffected siblings (total N=125 aged 9 to 26 years). Females with CAH had more interest in Things versus People than did unaffected females, and variations among females with CAH reflected variations in their degree of androgen exposure. Results provide strong support for hormonal influences on interest in occupations characterized by working with Things versus People. “

Hines (2016) found that “Individual variability in human gender-related behaviour is influenced by many factors, including androgen exposure prenatally, as well as self-socialization and socialization by others postnatally…Here, we report that girls exposed to high concentrations of androgens prenatally, because they have the genetic condition congenital adrenal hyperplasia, show changes in processes related to self-socialization of gender-related behaviour. Specifically, they are less responsive than other girls to information that particular objects are for girls and they show reduced imitation of female models choosing particular objects. These findings suggest that prenatal androgen exposure may influence subsequent gender-related behaviours, including object (toy) choices, in part by changing processes involved in the self-socialization of gendered behaviour, rather than only by inducing permanent changes in the brain during early development. In addition, the findings suggest that some of the behavioural effects of prenatal androgen exposure might be subject to alteration by postnatal socialization processes. The findings also suggest a previously unknown influence of early androgen exposure on later processes involved in self-socialization of gender-related behaviour, and thus expand understanding of the developmental systems regulating human gender development. “

So Recode inaccurately addresses Baron-Cohen’s body of work and falsely states no other studies have obtained similar results. I think the reason why they inaccurately addressed it is because they don’t like the idea of research producing results that lend credibility to biology in explaining social phenomena such as i.e. how men and women orient themselves in the job market. You should never forget that all social phenomena is basically explained by 2 major factors: biology and environment. People need to be clear in arguing how biology or the environment is affecting behavior. Ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum poison the discourse, but for those who strictly stick with the science, a coherent explanation can be sought.

Recode goes on to state “There is much literature that flat-out contradicts Baron-Cohen's study, providing evidence that male and female infants tend to respond equally to people and objects, notes Elizabeth Spelke, co-director of Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. But media stories continue to promote the idea of very different brains on little evidence.” Spelke mostly focuses on sex and intelligence when it comes to the STEM gender gap debate. It doesn’t have much at all to do with Cohen’s research. I don’t think they’re using Spelke’s work in the right context here. If they are, you’re welcome to explain it.

When it comes to Damore’s claims on neuroticism, Recode states “He implies that stress and anxiety are personality traits inherent in females, but more likely they are due to the pressures and discrimination women face on the job that men do not. For example, a 2008 report sponsored by major companies, “The Athena Factor,” found that women in high positions in male-dominated fields, such as tech, suffer harsher penalties than men when they slip up.” First off, I disagree with the wording stress and anxiety are ”inherent in females”, rather they on average score higher on these personality traits, but the example listed as to why that may be the case (pressures and discrimination) is not a bad example. I don’t doubt women working in male-dominated fields deal with a certain kind of stress/pressure that could potentially make them score higher on neuroticism. However, there is strong evidence that, regardless of socialization pressure, David P. Schmitt states “sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth”. Therefore, Damore was not wrong to state the scientific literature on neuroticism and the socialization explanation Recode provides does not adequately explain the findings of sex differences in neuroticism being universal across cultures, developing exactly the same time cross-culturally, linked to diagnosed mental health issues, and appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, etc.

Recode states “A review of studies of U.S. decision makers who have the power to hire candidates found that clearly competent men were rated higher than equally competent women. This bias is especially rampant in the high-tech industry.” Yes, this example of bias is rather clear I think, and may contribute to the gender gap in not just STEM, but careers in general. Recode goes on to say “competent men are seen as likeable, while competent women are seen as bitchy, that women get less credit for their accomplishments than men do, that men are often promoted on promise while women get elevated only on the basis of performance, and that sexual harassment is a constant problem for women in tech.” I don’t see any references for these claims, and I personally have never seen competent females as “bitchy” so I can’t relate. However, historically I’ve seen examples of women getting less credit for their accomplishments than men (I work in STEM so I’ve learned about historical female scientists struggle for recognition they rightfully deserved) so I can concede that point.

Recode goes on to say “All of these are issues that males simply do not have to face. The “anxiety gap” exists for a reason, and it is not about biology.” Yeah, bullshit. The difference in societal treatment and expectations of men and women is not a powerful enough explanation to explain why women cross-culturally score higher on average on neuroticism than men. The only way you could believe that is by believing the entire world is viciously sexist by pressuring and stressing women out throughout all cultures motivated by prejudice and the perception of gender roles. Or in another way of putting it, the socially constructed patriarchy is the better explanation of these findings. Sure it is.

Recode goes on to discuss how men tending towards work-life and women tending towards work/family balance is wrong because companies nowadays are allowing paternity leave for men and some men are taking it. At this point I’m getting tired of responding to all of Recode’s points but I will say they ignore psychology and just claim “men have paternity leave too” as if that’s strikingly relevant or something. Overall, this article should be removed from RW because it doesn’t address the central tenets of the memo and goes on to make a case for why women are just as capable of working STEM jobs as men, which is true, and has not a damn thing to do with the memo. No one is even disputing women’s capabilities in STEM except maybe staunch right wingers, and it’s obvious such right wingers would be by default in support of the memo, but like I discussed earlier, you’re not defined by the people who agree with you.

Regarding your points on Damore misrepresenting science, you claimed: 1. Schmitt said Damore’s findings that attempt to evaluate the totality of personality based on gender alone were like using an axe to operate on someone and applying cross-cultural differences to the google workplace isn’t effective at all.

1. Here is exactly what Schmitt said: “But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance…the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large…So, using someone’s biological sex to essentialize an entire group of people’s personality would be like operating with an axe.“ I agree with him; using sex to essentialize an entire group of people is generally not useful because it doesn’t address people on an individual basis, and individuals can be very different than the norm. But Damore wasn’t essentializing an entire group of people based on sex; in fact, he clearly stated there is much overlap per personality trait between men and women. In other words, men and women are more alike than they are different. He used personality differences to explain the gender gap in tech. That’s not the same thing as essentializing an entire group of people.

The context here was the relevance of neuroticism to the google workplace, and I agree with Schmitt, I don’t know how neuroticism is relevant to the Google workplace on the basis of gender. But Damore never centered his argument on the premise that neuroticism contributed to the Google work place (other than his side comment about the Googlegeist and high stress jobs). Damore argued sex differences may in part explain the gender gap. That’s a whole different discussion. Damore never said “since women are on average more neurotic than men, this is why there is a gender gap.” Neuroticism was just one of various personality sex differences and it was only listed to elaborate on what exactly those sex differences were. Only an idiot would try to argue women are too neurotic to work at Google, or that the gender gap is due to women’s neuroticism. So no, Damore did not misrepresent the science.

In light of this exchange, there are certain edits I will make. I will not alter the alt-right or sexist allusions to Damore, even though I’d love to because I find these edits horrendous, since I tend to think the typical RW editor of this article reallyyyy would want to keep them, so they can have it. I will edit these however since no good argument justifies their stay:

“this means women have particular biological personality traits that hinder or at least discourage them in the workplace” --> “this means these biological differences “may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

“While Damore makes token appeals that these differences overlap between the sex populations as opposed to strictly confined to one gender, it doesn't take long for him to use his data to undermine goals sought against discrimination towards women at the systemic level, as the implication is that women are biologically this way and there's nothing that can be done about that. “ --> “Damore clarifies many of these differences “are small and there’s significant overlap” and goes on to argue that these differences have an unequal outcome effect on the gender gap.”

Removing this sentence: “Likewise, these findings are true in only the most banal sense, ignoring that much of scientific literature has recognized that there is a difference between genders but has downplayed their significance overall.[12]”

I will remove “It gives sweeping generalizations of the left and right…” and replace it with something more reasonable including sources.

I’m removing the Recode article because it strawmans the memo and refutes the strawman it created, meanwhile not addressing the memo’s tenets in any reasonable way.

I’m removing “In addition to implying that women were less skilled at their jobs at others, he inadvertently created the atmosphere of discrimination he claimed he was fighting against, for both women and POC. Worse yet, his answers gave no actual remedy to the lack of women and POC in higher positions that would give them equal footing with white men” because this is just opinionated nonsense with no substantial backing to warrant it’s presence in the article.

“The issue within the memo, however, is how Damore interprets the results of the studies.” --> “The issues and concerns people raise about the memo is its claim of the gender gap being caused by biological factors and its argument against affirmative action policies.”

Take home message: Discussing gender differences in the context of career choices and social orientation is not always motivated by prejudice. Damore isn't evidently prejudiced according to the memo. If he is, then I'm prejudiced too and we are just too prejudiced to understand the pinnacle of rationality found on RW's articles of politicized figures. --Moobnert (talk) 17:50, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

There's not much here that's new from you, just a lot of PRATT and rewording the same stuff over and over again. But as this exchange will hopefully show, this will probably be my final reply. My patience with your stubbornness is exhausted at this point.

Alright, on with the show.

The alt-right: I don't think you know the alt-right as well as you think you do. You don't need to make a big deal out of a white ethnostate or the decency of Nazis to be alt-right. Usually people who say, "I guess you call everyone you disagree with a Nazi," or, "To what extent am I a Nazi?" or other such garbage are ignoring the overall bagging beneath. Someone who makes a big deal about the legacy of the West, how it's under attack whether it's from Marxism or the degenerate hordes, while downplaying the struggles of women and transgender people to attain equality or at the very least respect, should raise enough red flags for anyone to be suspicious of their honesty and what they're really trying to get at. At the end of day, white nationalists, genuine Nazis, etc., their beliefs overlap too much and fall into a general umbrella of bigoted shite. You're splitting hairs here.

Peterson attained his notoriety through making a big deal of a law which would have people respect transgender pronouns and made it out to be something related to free speech which is complete nonsense. He makes a big deal out of "teh SJWs" which speaks for itself, all the while pissing on the bogeyman of Marxism and talks about the glory of "the West," and how we need to protect it, which is a dogwhistle if I've ever seen it. He also talks about how women love manly dominant guys, so clearly discrimination against women is bollocks amirite? Yes, I think he's bad news and shares enough views typical of the alt-right without the racist packaging that he qualifies as that. He dismisses incels and other Nazi shitheads sure, but on the other hand, he makes a big deal out of laws designed to protect people and focuses on the nebulous issue of "free speech," as it relates to anti-hate laws, all the while shutting down those who don't have a voice so he can air his views without any repercussion.

Rogan platforms the likes of Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steven Crowder. People with dangerous rhetoric aimed to undermine the disadvantaged at best, and at worse, outright promote conspiracy theories that have landed with innocent people getting hurt or worse. See Pizzagate and the Sandy Hook bullshit he's promoted. All the while refusing to call them out. At one point he has admitted he thinks that Alex Jones is an entertaining dude. He even once defended Dave fucking Rubin of all people on his Twitter. He qualifies.

Shapiro is close enough too. Being transphobic as hell and thinking that Arabs like to bomb crap and live in sewage, someone who defends Steve Bannon paling around with Nazis as not anti-semitism, yeah, that speaks for itself. He's also selling Infowars style supplements now apparently, Alex Jones style. For crying out loud, he was a writer for Breitbart. This ain't hard to parse.

Yiannopoulos goes out of his way to limit gay rights, attack transgender people, and was one of the big voices behind Gamergate, all the while crying how he values free speech. His status as a gay dude who is married to a black man is superficial. That doesn't get into the fact that he is a literal fucking Nazi.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-mercers-wash-their-hands-of-milo/544877/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/paypal-suspends-milo-yiannopoulos-over-nazi-based-trolling-of-jewish-journalist/

Whether it's in the form of trolling, or having Nazi related passwords, or photos of him floating around the web wearing Hitler's Iron Cross, yeah man, he's a Nazi. He's bad news period. This isn't a, "Oh I guess he passes enough so you get this victory," he is one. There's no getting around it. You've never heard of self-loathing POC and others who become completely enthralled to an evil ideology? Next you're gonna tell me that you've never heard of a Quisling.

Molyneux talks about race realism and the threat of the degenerate hordes to the West, all the while singing the praises of Trump and white civilization. Yeah, talking about race and IQ is almost universally an alt-right dogwhistle. I don't know what you being a mixed-race POC in a country where whites are a minority has to do with anything but you are far too forgiving of these types.

Honest to god, there's probably some people that he went on that I'm missing, but fuck it, I don't feel like reviewing the list of shady assholes that Damore eagerly went to after he was fired. A good number of those people, Molyneux and Yiannopoulos included at the least, have repeated outright Hitler tactics of branding themselves as being unfairly silenced while ignoring the reasons of what they're being silenced for. As in, they are actually taking photos of themselves with their mouths taped shut, the same way der Fuhrer's Nazi buddies drew political cartoons of him with his mouth unfairly taped shut by the press on his political campaigns. What you're doing here is practically rules lawyering. Modern conservatism and by extension libertarianism today is such a goddamn mess that it skirts far too closely towards the alt-right for anyone to be comfortable with. They are far too ready to adopt alt-right ideas, especially if it means shitting on the libs.

And I'm certainly unwilling to give him any pardons after going to these people willingly. When his memo is based on discrimination, there's no good reason for him to speak to alt-right assholes so freely. These people thrive on this kind of rhetoric, especially if it's misuse of science to justify their bigotry. He's not someone like Trevor Noah who allowed a scuzzy taint like Tomi Lahren on his show with the express purpose of letting her compare to the Black Panthers to the KKK or ask, "What did the KKK do?", he's a programmer who said vile things and went on to be interviewed by big time people who share his wretched beliefs. I don't know if he's actually alt-right but his refusal to outright take a stand and instead sue Google for "viewpoint diversity" for discriminating against conservative white dudes, is enough to cast a shadow and make me doubt his actions and intentions. I'm not even going into how you're willing to turn a blind eye to his weird remarks about the KKK. You just think it's totes hilarious, them crazy KKK members with their hoods and their lynchings and their wide resurgence today. No red flags here.

Women and neuroticism: Fraid not. Saying that women are more neurotic is just a "scientific fact" and actually divorced from stereotypes is batshit as they come, and anyone who can't see the problem with such a statement needs to get their head checked. People used religion and science in the past to try and say it was "natural" that they black people were enslaved because of natural deficiencies, that they were 3/4 of a person, or used the likes of phrenology to make a bunch of ignorant fuckin assumptions about their brains. You are far too willing to give credence to some Damore's caricature of science, all the while playing down the role of discrimination in the workplace and how it affects the underprivileged. And even if he was right about the biology, that women are more neurotic, this is a classic naturalistic fallacy. More to the point, any science that makes negative blanket assumptions about peoples' personality and intelligence based on gender and race or whatever given the overall history of racism and sexism in the world on a whole automatically earns themselves a red slip as far as I'm concerned. They dug themselves in a pit, now they have to get out. Damore can either admit he was wrong or explain himself in a way that doesn't incriminate himself, but he's only doubled down since then.

As he says that women are good at tech as well as men but with the caveat that they're not naturally interested in it or they're naturally neurotic and thus can't cope with stress the same as men or aren't status seeking. Yeah, that is saying that women can't compete as well as men. He already shoots himself in the foot when he says that women naturally don't have an interest in it but no, they're apparently too neurotic for the workplace too so they require special accommodations. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how this would translate into workplace efficiency. That's discriminating against someone, straight up. That is making blanket assumptions based on their gender. He gives the token statement of individuals matter to ply away any criticisms all the while focusing on neuroticism in populations of women, across all cultures across history. Even though the difference is small, he still thinks it's still enough to warrant a “discussion.” I see that shit for what it is.

Maybe, and just maybe it's probably more like certainly, this man is not acting in good faith. Maybe the truth is that he is, whether he realizes it or not, a dingus who is playing by the playbook of the alt-right and other disingenuous company. Suing Google for viewpoint discrimination against white male conservatives? With the current representation stats there? What a joke. I seriously wonder how you can see his current actions and think that sarcastic statements like "Perhaps you think Damore thought “man I can’t stand these neurotic females in my sausage fest of a company, I wonder if I can find scientific literature proving women are more neurotic than men so I can get rid of these affirmative action programs and maintain my manly kingdom.” He was specifically elaborating on gender differences, not arbitrarily chosen personality traits where he can sinisterly take a jab at women for ****ing up his precious white male conservative work life," look more at home on an apologia for him than a political satire skit straight out of Colbert or SNL.

Nor do I give a shit about his feminist girlfriend. This is the equivalent of someone who has black friends, so they can't be racist amirite? Give me a break. The thing that really sticks out is your outright refusal to understand why people have a problem with Damore's memo. You'll sugarcoat his more problematic statements with it just being science, while refusing to consider that he thinks biology matters so much that he recommends altogether shutting down programs designed to help women and POC reach parity with men on the banal excuse that it's “discrimination.” To say nothing that he highlights women being neurotic as one of the reasons they can't function in tech jobs as well as men or are failing to meet representation. Statements like that help nobody and recommends pair work, even though pair work is by necessity included in tech jobs, and emphasizes part-time work as a solution, when the goal is so that more women have full time work. But you'll still parrot out that old canard about “leftist bias,” without question and apply it to anything you disagree with no matter the context, no matter how much of a tool it makes you look like.

On another note, Damore says that neuroticism is apparently such a problem in women that it impacts women asking for raises at work. Well uh...

https://hbr.org/2018/06/research-women-ask-for-raises-as-often-as-men-but-are-less-likely-to-get-them

Turns out women DO ask for raises at work the same as men but get the short end of the stick far too much. Shit man, so much for a Harvard-educated Google engineer. Way to keep in line with the science brah!

re: contradiction. Claiming that the sex differences are small, but apparently biology matters so much that we need to make certain lifestyle changes to accommodate women at work based on biology. Something doesn't add up.

Affirmative action: No, trying to help the underprivileged gain representation where they normally wouldn't be able to is not a matter of perspective, it's about not being a raging shithead. You're already assuming that these programs sacrifice competence in exchange for filling out a quota when that is not the case. They pick out qualified applicants from underrepresented populations. I'm not going to give a pass to businesses who are overrepresented in white dudes either. White cishet guys have the most power, the idea that affirmative action is "discriminating" against them is akin to the libertarian canard that taxation is an evil akin to murder. Give me a break.

It's also sexist to think that women "naturally" don't prefer STEM to other interests.

https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pushing-women-out-of-stem

The science was out two years before Damore and his dumb memo. Quite the pill to swallow, huh? Nevermind that your claims that women naturally avoid tech are both unsupported and contradicted by how women flourished in the field over here in the states before it became lucrative enough that men would come to dominate it. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that. Your defense of Damore's prison analogy is also disturbing to say the least. You're not going to take seriously an example that deliberately serves to mock efforts at equal representation, okay. I can see where your heart lies. And it's telling that you actually think more men are in prison than women because of biology. Do yourself some homework and look at the school to prison pipeline. Look at the ways in which marginalized POC are practically groomed for a life in prison by the higher-ups from day one.

But hey, you want to play that game with the construction business, I can do that too.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/dec/12/construction-industry-becoming-increasingly-gender-segregated-report-finds

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/07/women-in-majority-male-workplaces-report-higher-rates-of-gender-discrimination/

http://progressillinois.com/posts/content/2014/06/12/report-discrimination-major-employment-barrier-women-construction-workers

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/female-bricklayer-awarded-pounds-15000-council-employee-suffered-four-years-of-continual-sexual-1477059.html

I mean for crying out loud, this is a matter of common sense. You don't think there are bullish rough ass women out there? Women are completing the Army Ranger school now. They ain't all a bunch of little flowers.

I don't know what your relative's workplace experience has to do with anything either. Trying to lay the blame on affirmative action here is moving the goalpost from the glaring issue that he's trying to emphasize part time work for women because they're neurotic. Or they just plain don't have an interest in tech. Even if affirmative action is problematic as you seem to be implying, it's nowhere near as bad as the current system.

And seriously, fuck Emil Kirkegaard.

On another note, I eventually did find the abstract for this study on its own, since I refuse to go to that Neo-Nazi pedoshit's website, and apparently he played no involvement in it? But even according to the abstract, the methodology involved lends no credence whatsoever to biology. It even said that "Application of some item development strategies can substantially reduce sex differences." In a study that involved handing out technical manuals, yeah, that's absolutely damning.

Misrepresentation: It's a small percentage of difference between men and women, but apparently there's enough of a difference in biology that it warrants a discussion about the workplace which completely upends the narrative of discrimination? Doesn't hold water. Or you'll grasp at straws about women just aren't interested. For whatever reason.

Politics: I'm seriously not interested in this, as it's such a small component here that poring through the literature here will take far too much time to achieve practically nothing. However given that you've argued rather poorly so far, that's not an admission of me conceding and it's certainly not grounds for you to remove anything. Maybe I'll tackle it later, maybe I'll tackle it never, or maybe someone else will do this, but for right now, it just doesn't concern me. There are a few statements that don't sit right with me, for example, how conservatives and liberals apparently overlap when it comes to egalitarianism and compassion. Or how a bunch of hypotheticals were used to demonstrate that much of what constitutes conservative ideology has been subverted even in conservatives within the present era. I already know you're gonna say, "Well men and women overlap too! So Damore can't be sexist! He emphasized individuals!" Difference is, Damore is attempting to make policy based on gender. Yeah, that's pretty bad.

Yet the thing that still sticks in my craw is Damore's labeling of how far left companies would be too trusting of its competitors while far right companies would be excessively paranoid. Not buying it, especially when you look at the business world of acquisitions and mergers. Damore's rendering of things is something straight from a Saturday morning cartoon.

Recode: When Damore talks about women being more neurotic and needing part-time work or being paired with others in order to compete with men? Then yes, that is a statement on their capabilities as women. I'd say the degree to which women are underrepresented is in tech can be read as sex segregation, and so more institutionalized sexism and discrimination. Your insistence on removing the Recode article because it dismissed the Baron-Cohen study based on what you see as going against their "leftist ideology" is a huge red flag. You're going to take an actual collection of scientists' conclusion on the Baron-Cohen article as being motivated by ideology alone and then use that as grounds to take it seriously within the context of the discussion while accusing them of either strawmanning or lying.

https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boots-on-what-the-evidence-says-about-mr-damores-google-memo-bc93c8b2fdb9

Here's an article right from the main page that takes issue with Baron-Cohen along with many other things Damore has said, but you refused to even address it, just giving all your attention to the Recode article so that you can mischaracterize it and dismiss it as leftist nonsense. You can also find discussion there about the problems of cross cultural evaluation as it relates to gender too. And finally, one of the sources in the main page linked to this article as backing for their criticisms of Damore.

psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01642-012

But I'm the one blinded by leftist ideology. Yet you can't even be bothered to pore through the main page with any amount of thoroughness before making hasty claims and linking to shady websites. No, you'll just look for examples of leftist bias whenever you see it without seeing the bigger picture. So really this whole debate is about your ego. I will say this much, I am a fool for obliging you but rebutting your giant wall of text that only repeats the same points over and over again should either shape you up in the future or remind everyone else here that you refuse to argue in good faith so I can rest easy.

On that note, you never actually take seriously any of the counter studies or their statements, you just give your token two cents on it as being either irrelevant or simply being used out of context without a proper review all the while expecting me to give full attention to everything you say. You even shut down Spelke prematurely despite her input and credentials. Fucking A man. In a discussion where the issue is women's biology and relying on a study like the Baron-Cohen one that involved something as random infants paying attention to stuff, you're going to ignore the complex intricacies of boys and girls interacting in a school environment? Something which is related to sex and gender, but it's not about tech or the gender wage gap (which is an arbitrary factor seeing as how the larger issue of discrimination against women and POC period is very much related to STEM), so it doesn't count. Not to mention that according to you, women aren't inherently more neurotic, they just score higher. But there's nothing wrong with that statement. So I'll say right now that it's sexist dogwhistling and when it's highlighted and used in the context of women seeking representation, particularly damning. You say it's small, that it doesn't mean anything, that it can't be harmful, but you can only say that if you concede sex differences are large enough to impact their personality and work performance, and it's especially bad when you use it to outright say that discrimination isn't a major factor.

Again you mischaracterize Schmitt. He outright says that the differences between men and women are minor at best, and says that applying it to the workplace is like using an axe to perform surgery. But again you'll ignore this statement so you can outright say right there that biology and neuroticism are the cause between gender differences and that discrimination is bunk. Even though you admitted you worked in STEM before and have said you've seen female scientists get screwed over unfairly, you're unwilling to give the idea of systemic bias much credit. He's even admitted that more than just affirmative action is needed, that there are major biases to women's representation in the workplace. I don't know why you keep referencing this guy, but he ain't on your side, that's for sure.

And I missed this earlier, but Schmitt definitely shoots himself in the foot when he says that the female tech figures at Google are 18-20% yet Google's affirmative actions programs are working just swell. Absolutely laughable. He can join the rest of those dinguses that were referenced in that garbage Quillette article posted earlier. The rest of your dismissal of the Recode article is wholly malicious and not at all motivated by inquiry either. When men have advantages and women don't, but also have paternity leave, then yeah, that kind of smashes to pieces the whole “work-life balance,” myth as it applies to women.

I'm not looking at the scientific studies you referenced either. The Beltz study was already covered enough by ikanreed for me to be suspicious of both your use of it and it's own methodology, but if you're going to use sources from Emil Kirkegaard and the Heterodox Academy I'm not playing around with you anymore. That's not even getting into how you put forth your own agenda and demand it to be taken seriously but adamantly refuse to extend me the same courtesy, let alone the entirety of the main page which is well researched and sourced a thousand times over. With all the sourcing I've been doing to back up my statements in this talk page alone while you decide to rules lawyer and move the goalposts repeatedly, clearly someone here is an ideologue, and it sure as hell ain't me.

So for an update, I actually looked at the article Damore references in his memo for saying that women prefer a work-life balance, and uh, well it is disappointing to say the least. The article admits that most women in senior positions of management are childless due to the demanding hours, but that most men who work demanding hours can have their partners cover for their home life. It also admits that full-time work in the highest sectors can be so demanding that it leaves no room for maternity leave. When it comes to couples who want to raise a family, obviously the man is going to have the advantage here. That's not even getting into how preference theory is fairly controversial in and of itself. A simple search on a site as random and unreliable as Wikipedia admitted that Hakim's work doesn't account for the correlation/causation problem, that it didn't pare out well in the Czech Republic, and another study conducted to measure it's usefulness in eleven European countries found support only in Britain and Denmark. I can only begin to imagine how well it fares in the larger world of scientific literature.

That doesn't even get into how Hakim herself isn't exactly the most reputable scholar. She published an article last year arguing that women are to blame for their own sexual assaults because they have lower sex drives than men, and even goes straight into the territory of Douthat and Peterson when she says that legalized prostitution will help curb the amount of sexual assaults. She shits all over #MeToo, and claims that some claims of sexual harassment is just men being "bad at flirting." She takes the side of Aziz Ansari. Ye gods. A person like THIS is the sole source of Damore's work-life claim. I guess I shouldn't be surprised then that she works for right-wing think tanks. Yikes. And I thought you referencing Emil Kirkegaard's site was bad news. This is some straight up Christina Hoff-Sommers bullshit. Don't think there's much you can do to explain away this blunder on Damore's part. Then again, this whole discussion is based on a man who is currently suing Google for viewpoint diversity and blamed Google for trying to claim that conservatives felt stifled based on their viewpoint, something which is not at all relevant to the workplace as opposed to sex and gender, which is something you just can't change (and trans people face their own can of worms, needless to say). Now more than anything, this definitely reinforces my bad opinion of him.

On another more relevant note, your remark of how only an idiot would use women's neuroticism as an excuse to say they're not good at their jobs and especially as it relates to the gender gap in tech? Well done, you just hit the nail on the head! Yes, there are lots of bad and shitty people who think this way, and I do think Damore is one of them! From trying to dismantle programs meant to help women and POC reach equal representation with men and white people to developing his own programs that emphasize part time work and pair work as opposed to full time work and all those weird things he says about women's psychology, I don't trust him. I only read what you said as another throwaway comment without backing so I ignored it like the rest of how you defend Damore's more questionable deeds without question, but that cuts right to the heart of the matter.

Re: the Athena Factor.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2572117/

Have fun. The great thing is that some of this stuff is available through a simple Google search or as I'm demonstrated before, documented even on the main page itself. But you'll ignore that and pull out your own sources, ignoring what I say and just focusing on your own arguments ad nauseum, dismissing any and all concerns of discrimination as some vague smear of “leftist bias.”

Your rejection of discrimination as a cause for neuroticism here is painfully apparent too because it's the ol nature/nurture problem again. If discrimination really is that widespread, then maybe, just maybe, that can be a cause for anxiety too. HBD folks rightfully get tarred when they make asshole remarks about blacks being naturally dumber and will twist science to try and make themselves look right, but even if you accept and concede that they're using science correctly, there's still a problem. Suppose there are enough IQ differences in order to raise eyebrows and their science is right, that leaves out the elephant in the room of centuries of abuse fucking with the emotional and mental well-being of a race's people and culture. Nothing to do with biology and everything to do with learned helplessness. Hell, I'll take a page from Peterson on his lobster obsession and say that similarly rattlesnakes used to wave the rattles at the end of their tails to warn predators to back off but as humans began hunting them in wanton numbers and found them more easily when they used their rattles, rattlesnakes have altogether stopped using their rattles.

So yes, discrimination can easily play a factor in affecting peoples' behavior. Saying that women are “naturally” neurotic is like saying that abuse victims must have wanted it or were lying because they refused to leave, nevermind that an asshole like that who could so easily jump to such a conclusion preemptively judging someone is precisely why abuse victims don't come forward to begin with. Of course the final nail in the coffin when it comes to this discussion is that you'll laugh off the idea of the patriarchy yet again because “dem crazy feminists lawl. GUESS THE WORLD IS JUST A SEXIST PLACE HUH GUISE?”

Sure, yeah, that actually makes sense. You are seriously underestimating the evils humanity is capable of. Hitler rose to power on the promise of anti-Semitism and the superior race and Trump similarly was elected riding on a stallion of racism and sexism and people ate that shit up. The American South was willing to secede and make their own nation because they believed they had a right to enslave and do whatever they wanted with black people, all the while far too many contemporary Americans romanticize them on a daily basis while ignoring that they committed treason. That's not getting into everything that's wrong today. Take your just world theory bullshit and shove it back where it belongs. The world is a bad and rough place for a lot of people who have it unfair on for no good reason other than that they happened to be there.

And of course, you'll close by saying that Damore isn't racist or sexist according to the memo's own words. Talk about a tautological circlejerk if there ever was one. For that matter, yeah, people ARE naturally prejudiced. People who say they don't see race or sex are completely full of shit. That doesn't make anyone a bad person necessarily or even racists or sexists for taking notice of race and gender first, but it will always play a role. History has proven that time and time again. Same with class and inequality and all that fun stuff.

As my (long awaited) conclusion, I will say that it's especially absurd that Damore, and by extension you, make this solely a discussion about women's place in tech. You make a bunch of blanket statements about women and their biology, and then somehow translate this into strictly about women's place in tech. Let's entertain the notion for once that Damore used science completely correctly and that women really were that neurotic. Well that still says completely fuck all about women and why there's a gender gap in tech specifically. His insistence, furthermore, on removing programs designed to help women and POC, on de-emphasizing empathy, on insisting that discrimination can't play that much of a role on women's opportunities and that biology must also account for it either in support of some strange balance fallacy or without regard that if women ARE naturally neurotic, then shit man, an oppressive patriarchy could amplify that in myriad forms, naturally speaks for itself. There's no other real answer you can find than saying that yes, women are too biologically unsuited to work effectively as men. All that besides, the memo cherrypicks and machineguns studies down your throat without ever cogently arguing for it's findings. It offers an inane and vapid commentary that passes itself off as truth because it happens to randomly reference scientific studies.

James Earl Cash (talk) 03:34, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

response

I reverted your edits anyhow because I disagree with your assessment of the Recode article and I don't find Heterodox Academy a particularly reliable source, and the edit summary won't do justice. I'm hoping you don't go hard on me because that's a big chunk of text to digest, certainly not something I'd like to do in one setting, and I've tried getting James Earl Cash and maybe ikanreed to help parse through that chunk. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 18:53, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

@LeftyGreenMarioI don't see any justification in your statement justifying reversion."I don't find Heterodox Academy a particularly reliable source." And the reason would be what exactly? They may be out of step with some progressive opinion. Anything you can actually talk about? They are not a couple guys in a basement somewhere. Why don't you leave this to users who read the material. That usually works.Ariel31459 (talk) 21:27, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Oh that's easy, they're hyperpartisan dishonest fucks, who leverage complaints about free speech to silence as many left leaning voices as possible. Their org does no research, just editorializing on people who do. And no real advocacy besides blind support for anyone they deem conservative and receiving unfair treatment. They're a classic case of "because I agree with what you say, I'll defend to death your right to say it".

Their very definition of heterodoxy is basically hire more conservatives and make sure minorities experience maximum discrimination possible. They rank universities, on, for example, banning safe spaces and trigger warnings, as being more heterodox. Hell, they call their universally conservative team "heterodox" because honesty is second to winning. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 21:48, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

OK. I see there are political disagreements. Safe Spaces and Trigger warnings aside, I was thinking of their larger scientific standing.Ariel31459 (talk) 22:06, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

By the way, I don't find your defense of the prison comparison convincing. Damore was saying explicitly that minority outreach programs is like getting more people into prison, work-place deaths, homelessness, and school drop-outs. It's a very thoughtless comparison to make, with obvious problems (again I really shouldn't have to elaborate why helping women wanting to work in tech isn't like helping women wanting to be homeless). That men are overrepresented in those statistics is irrelevant to the topic, for similar reasons. Damore could've used a more desirable female-dominated work position as an analogy, which I'm sure exists, but I'm dumbfounded that those statistics are the first thing that came to mind when trying to make a parallel. Rhetorical device to poison the minority affirmative action programs? There's one final factor to make, however, and that's the nature of some of those jobs. I wouldn't completely dismiss discrimination and gender roles as an explanation for brick and cement masons disparity, though I won't dismiss the biological differences either (physical labor). But the pressures for these jobs are different (again those jobs require physical strength which men generally do have more muscle mass), so that's still not a great comparison. I'd still go with gynecology or dentist hygiene as professional jobs that both men and women are capable of doing, but have gender disparities. --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 23:47, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

@James Earl Cash "Turns out women DO ask for raises at work the same as men but get the short end of the stick far too much."

Let's say I argue that the neuroticism thing plays a role by negatively affecting the negotiating aspect of asking for a raise. It seems that women lack negotiating skills. Though it seems to be addressed and then stated that "we found no support for that" in your source, huh. But anyway, even so, this doesn't mean there's a biological aspect to it, it's just that women can be taught skills. And the employers should be educated on that and I hope they try their best to avoid falling into the trap of bias.

"The younger women in the labor market appear statistically indistinguishable — even in “getting” — from the younger men."

Encouraging for me. :D --It's-a me, LeftyGreenMario! 20:48, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Sorry that I'm a bit late to responding to this. I know the history section will show that I made one more edit after you added this, but for some reason the ping didn't show up in my notifications and I found it by checking the history section of this talk page. Weird.

Yeah, the great thing about that study too is that MRAs, Red Pillers, and others can't just throw their arms up and claim it's feminist propaganda. Since at one point, they quote there are both men and women who refuse to ask are that way because they fear they'll jeopardize their work relationships. They go out of their way to meet everyone's concerns. Shy guys and similar types are going to get the short end of the stick just as well. Young men and women are treated equally, though I hate to be a Debbie Downer here, but I'm not sure whether that's a good or a bad thing. Since that brings up the larger problem of patriarchy. Which is, that both men and women suffer under it. Look at how even someone like Terry Crews is getting a lot of grief from everyone for coming out about his MeToo moment.

Still, there really isn't an excuse for that five percent difference quoted at the beginning when it's based on gender as it applies to older workers or people in high positions of power. Keep it consistent. So there's still a ways to go before true parity is reached. James Earl Cash (talk) 00:25, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Subsection so you don't have to scroll to reply to this

Hoo boy. First of all, have you heard of the Gish Gallop? It's something you need to put more effort into not doing. Making a million disperate points in a dialog obscures truth more than it facilitates it. Because then if every single point is going to be given a rebuffing because it's not entirely accurate on the details, the cost of that response becomes insane, and not doing so can seem like conceding the point. It's not a good thing to do, and you need to learn to focus on a thesis and do the old middle school 5 paragraph essay style.

Because it's a pain to deep dive everything you've said. I've decided to do just one. Your beltz citation. The one you intend to establish that hormonal characteristics affect job preferences. It's immediately standout that they do, in this paper, a grand total of 10 such comparisons with really quite small sample sizes. And only get 2 p<0.05 correlations(and none any stronger). see this comic to understand where this already suspect. One of which doesn't correspond with a sex-difference preference of similar certainty.

The sex differences, instead, are very strong correlations with low chance of random chance.(except the one that lines up with one of the p<0.05 on women-only hormone differences... weird.)

I'll admit, the author who is more qualified to draw conclusions about this data than me, seems to agree with you. But there's something quite off about taking that many small-sample-size comparisons, getting only a couple weak correlation results, with supplementary comparisons that question at least one of the primary hypothesis, and using the phrase "strong evidence" about it. And that's on top of using a secondary predictor of their primary mechanism as an intermediate variable. They don't use hormones to predict preference, they use a condition that's known to affect hormones. Such proxy measures are usually okay if the data is really sound, and the known level of variance of the intermediate variable is incorporated into the analysis. This is a disease that affects not just sex hormones, but every single signaling hormone in the body. Adrenaline, seretonin, metabolic steroids, and sex hormones, both testosterone and estrogen. The consequences of that are quite broad. Clinically, people tend to focus no the obvious external physical symptoms that usually have to do with the development of sex organs, but the underlying mechanism is not so simple.

Now, the fact that you got this tiny one little correlation in this one study with these big considerations is troubling. That your secondary sources that helped gather this information are some of the most fucky awful sources, literal rapist nazi fuckers should give you some pause along with examining how they came to their conclusions in more depth.

There's a reason scientists often oppose essentialism, above and beyond not liking bigotry. It's because such reductions are often made far-and-above what the evidence actually says. If you have a single, scientific source you'd like to take a deeper dive on, I'm game for that. But the whole pile of claims? Not interested. ikanreed ^{🐐Bleat at me} 20:08, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the subsection. I'll limit my response to some of the things @James Earl Cash mentioned.

Cohen-related studies: All these studies (Berenbaum, Baron-Cohen, Beltz, Hines) establish a relation of prenatal/postnatal androgen levels to gender-related behavior, so it’s incorrect to say they “have absolutely jack to do” with each other. Their findings are congruent, contradicting Recode’s claim. To say that high androgen levels in females predicting male-typical toy preference “shuts down any narrative that women typically prefer people vs things” is not logical. If findings show that higher levels of testosterone causes females to engage in male-typical behavior, that does not contradict the body of research where women and men cluster on a people vs. things dimension (most women don’t exhibit a male-typical androgen profile, for instance). The Hines study also did not “admit” that socialization choices affect gender-related behavior – It is clear, even taken for granted, that gender-related behavior is affected by socialization.

Neuroticism: Your argument is entirely without merit. Current literature contradicts the claim that the gap in neuroticism is a consequence of socialization/discrimination as David P. Schmitt has written about. Indicators of causes external to socialization include 1. Consistency across all cultures 2. Enlarging as culture becomes more gender egalitarian (r= 0.69) 3. Correlation to developmental onset 4. Links to gene activation, hormones, neurology 5. Prenatal androgen profiles correlated to behavior. Some of these are rather direct measurements of biology like 5., some are kind of direct but not definitively so due to socialization also affecting these routes 3. and 4., indirect evidence are 1. and 2. – What can be stated however, is that if discrimination is responsible for many gender gaps we see today, it wouldn’t make sense that the gap increases as you decrease discrimination. From that alone, it's difficult to concede your claim that discrimination is the main factor affecting the gap in i.e. neuroticism, STEM. Also, I never claimed that scoring higher on a trait is divorced from stereotypes; my claim was that scientific findings in gender differences should not be regarded as stereotypes, and you seem to treat them as indistinguishable.

A flaw in your argument: Out of the 3-bulletpoint gender differences Damore lists, you arbitrarily highlight one of them and make a big deal out of it. I think that detracts from the real point of the memo which is that the gender gap is in part explained by the distribution of traits between men and women. The sub-bulletpoints were postulates of his given his understanding of the literature on gender differences; the main bulletpoints are literature-verified claims. His postulates are not necessarily backed by research as they can just be inferences based on current literature.

Schmitt: You consistently ignore Schmitt everytime when I quote “sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed…mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth” – Is this a stereotype? No.

“Damore says that neuroticism is apparently such a problem in women that it impacts women asking for raises at work. Well uh... Turns out women DO ask for raises…Way to keep in line with the science brah!”

The article you linked refers to a study that was published in May 2018. Damore’s memo was released in August 2017. This is good research and I don’t see why Damore wouldn’t agree, but you made some mistakes here. First, the memo was referring to extraversion and agreeableness, NOT neuroticism, in relation to impacting women asking for raises. Second, implying Damore is not keeping in line with science when the study was published months after the memo is disingenuous. Besides this, at best this calls into question his postulate which relates extraversion/agreeableness to ‘having a harder time asking for raises’, but it doesn’t dismiss the main claim of the gender gap being caused in part by gender differences, and it certainly didn’t misrepresent literature indicating women are on average more agreeable.

Damore lets his readers know in the memo “Of course, I may be biased and only see evidence that supports my viewpoint…I’d be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations” – this would be a citation worth mentioning to Damore to use and review/correct the memo.

Scientific racism: The research methodology found in scientific racism is not in any way comparable to the research methodology found in modern psychology; I’m actually impressed you even compared the two. Scientific racism is pseudoscience, whereas psychological studies on gender differences use psychometrically valid measurements. Comparing the two isn’t valid, unless your only point is ‘research denoting differences between people is fallacious and sinisterly motivated’, which I regard as a shallow viewpoint to say the least because it doesn’t address the evidence, it just alludes to equality virtue signaling (which I define as assuming unequal outcomes is by default a negative thing) and assumes a gender gap itself is evidence of discrimination when it isn't initially evidence of anything other than being multivariate in nature.

Naturalistic fallacy: the memo didn’t commit a naturalistic fallacy as you say because Damore was not arguing “natural is better”, he was only arguing gender differences contribute to the gender gap in tech and leadership. Whether or not natural is better, the memo made no claims either way.

Consider what Damore said in the memo: “Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink” – did he write this because he’s creating a naturalistic fallacy and is trying to justify the gender gap, or because he’s brainstorming ways to reduce the gender gap? And did he just speak positively of feminism, of all things, for making great progress in freeing women from gender roles? Probably just easier to label him a sexist, amirite? I don’t think that’s the right approach.

Your statement on science making ‘negative blanket assumptions’: In other words, you are instantly skeptical and quick to dismiss research if it indicates a discrepancy in negative personality traits. No wonder it’s impossible to convince you with evidence if you regard that evidence as just a furtherance of social ills.

Damore’s claim vs. suggestions: The claim was sex differences contribute to the gender gap. The claim wasn’t “sex differences require life style changes to accommodate women at work.” You’re mixing up his claim with his workplace suggestions, which aimed to make Google more appealing to more women. If you have a problem with his suggestions, fine, but don’t strawman his claim to mean that sex differences require workplace changes.

“The science was out two years before Damore and his dumb memo. Quite the pill to swallow, huh?...your claims that women naturally avoid tech are both unsupported and contradicted by how women flourished in the field over here in the states before it became lucrative enough that men would come to dominate it.”

LOL! Please, I’ve swallowed that pill years ago. Very easy info to come across when you’re in predominantly left-leaning academia. I have known for a long time that, given 2 identical applications, the male applicant will be regarded more favorably (same for i.e. Western vs. Arab-sounding names). This is good evidence of discrimination and to be sure, also contributes to the gender gap. I don’t deny any research regarding biological and environmental factors affecting social phenomena, however, you consistently argue how gender differences can’t account in any capacity for the gender gap if most gender differences are small, without realizing that small differences affect population distributions, causing an unequal distribution across various domains including occupational choice. Interest can affect occupational choice, and interests by gender are consistent in scoring among a people vs. things dimension, which can be used to predict gender disparities across STEM fields. Also, what makes you think the effects of these biases pushing women out of STEM can be observed by looking at the gender gap? That would mean these biases are more pronounced in our most gender egalitarian societies (displaying largest gender gaps) and least pronounced in our more patriarchal societies (displaying smallest gender gaps), which isn't logical.

The argument that gender differences are too small to affect i.e. Google’s gender gap is sort of like listening to someone claim human activity increasing CO2 concentrations from 0.03% to 0.04% can’t affect global temperature because it’s such a small difference of 0.01%. It’s not a good argument. Even if it was accurate to say that small differences do not affect population distributions, multivariate analysis shows personality differences are not small - Personality differences affect occupational choice; you can’t reasonably expect that unequal personality averages won’t affect population distributions across i.e. occupational choice and not produce a gender gap, regardless of your opinion on the people vs. things data cluster.

Prison analogy: I find it very entertaining that you describe my defense of the prison analogy as disturbing, but then again, you find jokes about the KKK unfunny serious business (grand wizard? lol ok, talk about being overtly sensitive and forgetting a world exists outside of the U.S where no real emotional attachment to the KKK exists and therefore hearing some stupid shit like "grand wizard" sounds like a Runescape character more than anything), so I shouldn’t be surprised. The prison analogy is appropriate just like anything else with a gender gap, because the point of the analogy is the gap itself. It is always a multivariate equation, and yes I’m aware of the school to prison pipeline (although that's mostly an american phenomena and the prison/crime gender gap is universal), but you cannot argue that sex differences play no role in the prison gender gap. If you were to ever argue this, I would be disappointed, but also extremely entertained that anyone would even attempt to do this.

But for fun, I'll entertain this a little longer. Besides your U.S-specific school-to-prison pipeline example, it is true that men are sentenced longer than women for the same crime (some stats show 1.63x longer) and obviously this affects the prison gender gap. However, differential treatment in sentencing is not the only factor as a lot of research indicates men commit much more crime than women. Moreover, here's a simple concept to consider: if you take trait aggression and randomly select a male and female out of the population and had to guess who was more aggressive, if you guessed the male you'd be right about 60% of the time. You'd be wrong 40% of the time though, which means there is significant overlap in trait aggression. However, if you look at the tail of the distribution of highest aggression, almost all individuals represented are men. The most aggressive people expectedly end up in prison. Hence, the gender gap in prison, while affected by environmental factors such as differential sentencing treatment, is also affected by sex differences, such as the distribution of trait aggression. It's ignorant to argue sex differences have nothing to do with the prison gender gap in the same way as it's ignorant to argue they have nothing to do with the gender gap in STEM, therefore the analogy is valid.

Emil Kerkewat: You’ve mentioned this guy 3 or more times. I’m sorry but I have no idea who Emil is and I don’t want to. The study itself has nothing to do with him, and I used his domain by mistake. You say Rong Su (2009) ‘lends no credence to biology’ – technically yes, that's true, however even to assume hypothetically biological factors do not affect interest, it shows nonetheless that interest (typically moderate to large differences) can affect the gender gap in STEM. Here, you can’t use the “the differences are too small” argument, even though that argument wasn’t useful initially.

Heterodox: If you want to play the game of “I dislike your source therefore the content is wrong”, then allow me to retort that MediaBiasFactCheck regards Heterodox Academy as more credible than Medium, which featured Erin Giglio’s article, and I regard MBFC’s calibration for political bias and fact-checking to be based on more stringent measures than yours. I’ll also mention Quillette’s rating since you dislike them as well. inb4 “MBFC is conservative propaganda”

Not that I’m taking MBFC’s assessment as gospel nor am I denouncing Erin’s argument, but it’s fun to point out considering your hand-waved dismissal of Heterodox. But really: address the content, not the source. They compiled a comprehensive list of psychology literature relevant to the memo’s claims and reviewed it, clearly highlighting data contrasting the memo’s claims and data supporting it. My main point is to discuss the relevant literature and Heterodox assists tremendously with that. I would say it even deserves a spot here in RW, although I’m sure some RW editors would not be happy with that.

Your claim of Damore making policy based on gender: Google makes policy based on gender. Google sets up diversity quotas (there’s your policy) to bridge the gender gap. That’s making hiring policy based on gender. Damore provided suggestions to reduce the gender gap which aren’t clear to be gender-bias policies or not. If Google did hypothetically grant i.e. part-time work for its employees, then that's not a gender-bias policy like affirmative action, regardless of the motivation to instantiate such a policy. However, if part-time work was granted only to women, then I would consider it as you just did, making policy based on gender.

Recode: What the article said about Baron-Cohen was NOT the reason why I wanted to remove it, although it’s a good reason. The reason was it claims “We can say flatly that there is no evidence that women’s biology makes them incapable of performing…any STEM fields.” – First of all, this is NOT the claim of the memo! This is a strawman it attempts to refute, and doesn’t address the actual claim like Heterodox has done competently. The memo claims “Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” - Second of all, current literature indicates that IQ/intelligence of men and women are pretty much the same (save for some nuance), and there's no good literature to suggest slight discrepancies in cognitive abilities explains the gender gap in STEM; it's not exactly a commonly-held view to claim there are less women in STEM due to differences in ability (see page 48, table 17) and it isn't the argument the memo made so Recode did a very poor job at accurately framing the discussion. I would recommend the Recode source be replaced with HarvardBusinessReview because they actually directly address the memo’s claim of biological differences affecting population distributions across occupational choice. It’s an article I’m sure you’d love or have already seen (although I wonder why it’s not already mentioned in the RW article). I have fair criticisms of it, but that's for another time.

Also, I have read Erin Giglio's article before and thought it was worth remaining because it makes a somewhat fair attempt at criticizing the memo similar to HBR. With that said, I don't mind addressing her views on Baron-Cohen's work. She says “I’m just going to say it outright: I don’t generally have a particularly high opinion of Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen’s work” – this should give you a hint on the author’s bias - but she goes on to criticize Cohen’s systemizing-empathizing theory and states “a 2006 study checked on this by comparing…empathy…There was no correlation…” Indeed, there is conflicting data on measuring gender differences of EQ and it's difficult to make any gender-related EQ claims at all. The merit of something such as EQ even existing is called into question on scientific grounds. Jordan Peterson has also criticized the validity of EQ. Wikipedia heavily discusses criticisms of EQ. Baron-Cohen’s theory is rather well supported for the systemizing aspect but relies on a psychological construct (EQ) that is not clear to measure what it thinks it's measuring.

However, HBR appears to contradict what I said about EQ’s controversial nature. But instead of just linking HBR as a rebuttal against Giglio’s critique of EQ, I will actually admit that EQ research is complicated, which is why some researchers question it and why I don’t have a problem with Giglio’s attempt to criticize the ER aspect of Cohen’s systemizing-empathizing theory. However, given that I don’t regard Cohen’s contributions as trivial, I will partly defend his use of EQ by citing literature suggesting women demonstrate on average more empathy. Systemizing-empathizing theory does predict empathizing to be the tendency of female-typical behavior, so it’s my understanding at least some relevant research doesn’t directly contradict this. Despite this, I concede the issue of measuring empathy.

However – despite this theory – it does not have much to do with the results of Cohen’s extensive prenatal testosterone research. Clear biological links to behavior have been established. It isn't random chance. The author addresses EQ, not prenatal androgens correlated to behavior. Males and females have different prenatal androgen profiles. When females have a male-typical prenatal androgen profile, they engage in male-typical behavior; this is biological evidence of sexually differentiated behavior. Erin’s critique of EQ does not refute this.

I could continue critiquing the rest of her article but I’m not here to do that. Although I will point out I do think the author indicates her biases in the text, including her comment on Cohen’s work and her comment regarding neutoricism: “I’ve already argued that those numbers look suspiciously inflated” – the implication of data manipulation is strong with that comment. For the rest, I don’t have a problem with the article; Recode however, is not a good article.

Cross cultural studies: The discussion you refer to criticizing these studies is far from convincing to dispense with the findings of these cross cultural studies. The evidence simply keeps consistent that as societies become more gender egalitarian (r= 0.69), men and women become more different, not more the same. If you absolutely refuse to believe that sexual differentiation exists within domains of personality and behavior leading to unequal outcomes in social orientation, then I really don’t know what to tell you. Maybe you do acknowledge it but think it’s negligible (or even worse, a justification for discrimination) in comparison to discrimination when discussing unequal outcomes.

Costa PT study: I don't know why you regard this study as "backing for...criticisms of Damore." as you put it. It states “gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders” – which is effectively the same as saying gender differences mostly overlap, as the memo has stated, and the article continues “Contrary to predictions from evolutionary theory, the magnitude of gender differences varied across cultures.” – The magnitude varies, because gender differences are a multivariate equation, and are affected by things such as culture, however differences remain consistent; they virtually never invert or equalize, although strangely they tend towards equalizing as gender egalitarianism decreases. Evolutionary theory on sexual differentiation predicts gender differences to transcend culture, which we observe. We also observe gender differences enlarge as society becomes more egalitarian, which wouldn't be expected if the differences were a consequence of discrimination. Not only this, but Costa (2001) reviewed 26 nations finding consistent differences, while Lippa (2010) reviewed 53 nations and Schmitt (2008) reviewed 55 nations, all with consistent results.

Spelke: I did not shut Spelke down; I simply did not understand Recode’s relating of Spelke’s research of intelligence to Baron-Cohen’s research on prenatal testosterone and behavior, or his theory, and I quote myself “I don’t think they’re using Spelke’s work in the right context here. If they are, you’re welcome to explain it.”

Systemic bias: I give credit to systemic bias, as it contributes to the gender gap. My only point is reducing environmental variability such as discrimination will still not get you close to equal representation because there is still biological variability to contend with, therefore the gender gap is not a good indicator of discrimination. STEM currently tends to show the smallest gender gap in the most patriarchal societies, and the largest gap in the most gender egalitarian societies. With this information, I can’t just conclude that combating discrimination will tend the gender gap towards ~50/50 because it appears to be doing the opposite. That is not the same thing as saying you shouldn't combat discrimination, it's only saying a gender gap will tell you nothing about discrimination and how effectively it's being combated. No serious person would look to a representation discrepancy as a measure, or even a rough measure, of discrimination.

Discrimination: In my honest view, I would say you give virtually no credence to "consequence of free choice" explanations, you talk a lot about discrimination in the world, you refer to researchers like Steven Pinker as a “fucking idiot” because of his optimistic views that are simply invalid to you due to all our contemporary unfolding atrocities i.e. global warming, colonialism; I would regard this as “hyperawareness of what is wrong in the world” and attribute it to your bias; you probably regard people who don’t rightfully emphasize discrimination as the answer to social discrepancies as alt-right enablers or straight up horrible people. I believe this is why it's easier to dismiss evidence of literature suggesting biological factors affecting behavior, because obviously, by default, sexists and racists argue biological factors, which is a problem for you.

I will admit that no one is infallible and everything I said earlier might be completely disproven as new evidence appears. Perhaps STEM will obtain equal representation once society moves on from sexism and gender differences don’t have anything to do with the gender gap, or we learn that interests are not affected by sex and mostly through socialization, or sexual differentiation negligibly affects behavior. Literature can go a long way in getting us to a reality check. However, what I fail to be convinced of is that Damore's conclusions, my conclusions, the conclusions of many women and people who research and engage literature, are conclusions motivated by the same thing that motivates scientific racism: bigotry. Sexism, racism, disadvantaging someone for superficial attributes you're arbitrarily hostile to. Sexists by default agree with the memo (just like how racists by default agree with nation borders but agreeing with having nation borders doesn't mean you're racist), but being sexist isn't a prerequisite to reaching similar conclusions upon reviewing the literature. --Moobnert (talk) 08:20, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Is there any reason you blatantly ignored ikanreed and the legitimate grievances brought up there? Okay, no? Guess I'll deal with your stalker ass then. I swear this is like Family Guy with Peter and the chicken.

1. You just admitted in the Hines study that socialization affects gender related behavior right there. Even still, you said that women with more testosterone prefer things and such. Yes, that establishes right there that the "typical" profile of women is flawed. Additionally, I definitely take serious issue with anyone who uses literal fucking babies as a test to determine the reliability of anything. Not to mention, as I now see, Baron-Cohen himself has received an extremely mixed reception in the scientific world. Using him as a proof for anything is problematic to say the least.

http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2003/Extreme_Problems_with_Essential_Differences/

kxthxbai

2. For the umpteenth fucking time, Schmitt said that biological differences are small and that using any gender related studies to extrapolate workplace related conclusions is like using an axe to operate on somebody. And yes, it's a stereotype when you make that much of a big deal about neuroticism. You're also missing the problem with the nature/nurture problem. I also posted the Erin Giglio link for that exact same reason, but you (again) ignored it, only changing the goalposts for some bullshit about emotional intelligence. Shit man.

3. You're missing the forest for the trees. If women are just as likely to ask for raises but get turned down, then yes, there is a problem. You continuing to defend Damore in spite of the HBR study being raised now is disingenuous to say the least. And of course Damore is going to say he's willing to "have a debate," all the while going out of his way to shut down women's contributions in early computing instead of fess up and admit he's wrong. An unbiased scholar he is not.

4. Sorry, I take any "research" that says that women are naturally uninterested in STEM and neurotic/more agreeable, etc. as full of shit and sexist as shit, the same way phrenology is full of shit. What a horrible person I am. Of course you only take issue with old-timey scientific racism because of the depth and methodology of it's research, which tells me you'll accept bullshit up to your eyes if it's sourced and thorough. You could fall for Satoshi Kanazawa. Good grief.

5. It's a naturalistic fallacy when you say that women are such and such, therefore it's natural, or even worse, that's how it has to be. This again ignores the problem of socialization as well as a greater problem of history. If all you see is one thing, that doesn't mean that perception is correct. People used to ascribe the Earth as the center of the universe, they used logical arguments to say that God is necessarily at one with the universe, but that's a problem of perception, and hardly means that it's correct. When the subject matter is equal gender representation in an actual tech sector, then you better believe a political agenda and policy making are intertwined. And of course he goes out of his way to shut down attempts at reaching minorities and women. Oops.

6. This is the literal definition of virtue signalling, way beyond the caricature shitty conservatives use. Next.

7. Negative blanket assumptions, yup, you're absolutely right. I take any science that does this as complete bullshit. Damore's nonsense and others is today's version of phrenology and other archaic bullshit. For this other gargantuan reply you made, you still haven't addressed any of my real counterpoints (again), just continuing to defend Damore and argue vehemently in his favor even when actual science proves him wrong. Welp.

8. That's like, the definition of a workplace change. I'll go ahead and address what you're probably gonna say anyway (again), that Damore brought up the caveat of saying that he knows many great female programmers, but this doesn't amount to jackshit. This is like some white guy going on about the problems of black people and saying, "Oh yeah, there's a few good ones!" Not for those types to decide mate. You're acting like it's some grand travesty that a good deal of women took issue with him after he published that stupid memo. And the race analogy is relevant because he's suing Google for discrimination against white conservatives. MOAR SALT PLZ.

9. For fuck's sakes, you say there's evidence of discrimination despite arguing for Damore, you link studies that say socialization affects behavior, but where does actual biology play a role here? Please show me, because you haven't, even after all this time. For the record too, even if discrimination isn't as widespread as people say it is, well that still doesn't make it so that biology has to be the leading cause here. Additionally, that Ceci, Williams study only proves my point. Yes, socialization can play a factor. It doesn't have to be a cruel patriarchy, it can be simply culture. Like when you bring up places that are more gender egalitarian, I've told you before that places like the Netherlands have actual cultural practices for women to work part-time, how said part-time work influences their chances in the workplace, how even there female managers are less represented in the upper echelons of industry. Have said this before and will say it again. It's quoted on the main page for crying out loud.

In addition, yes, the lack of what can appear normal in one highly patriarchial culture can be a symptom of what's wrong in a more "equal" culture. Context matters here. Please don't use one size fits all logic.

10. This is a big way to say a lot of nothing. That one study from Plos you cited only uses white people. No problems there, no. In addition, this again returns to the nature/nurture problem. And finally, I'll say this doesn't actually explain the tech gap or anything workplace related at all. A big fat fuckin, "NEXT!"

11. Sorry, when an American who is suing Google for discrimination against poor conservative wypipo says he wants to shut down programs meant to help minorities and women, makes jokes that defend the KKK, a literal hate group that used to hunt down and burn black people, in an era where white nationalism is resurgent I take that shit very seriously. I think Geert Wilders and Trump have goofy hair, but that doesn't make them any less of a real menace. That Furtuna study you just linked outright said that culture is related to men being violent, not an innate quality. I can't believe you give yourself so many self-owns, but be my guest. I'm loving it.

12. Obviously interest can affect the gender gap. Every study you've used though suggests that the way the occupation is portrayed can affect interest though, and whether that's a problem of biology or socialization, doesn't even matter when it shows that it's hardly innate. More likely than not, it's socialization, and you better believe that can be tied to either discrimination or just flat out ignorance of how people are which reinforces a system. Still waiting for you to pin this on biology as the cause of the gender gap, beyond the dubious use of Baron-Cohen and others where they study literal fucking babies and use that as proof of anything.

13. No, I'm not reading the Heterodox Academy's biased interpretation of psychological literature, and I'm willing to bet that Media Bias Fact Check looks at Medium as mixed because it's a very informal collection of articles from a whole lot of people, some good some bad, while Heterodox Academy and Quillette at least are consistent and honest in that they're ultra right-wing shitheads. They even rank the Cato Institute highly. Sorry, you're not gonna get me to read shit with excuses. Like as not, the high "factual reporting" is that they report correctly from third party sources, but then offer their own spin on things. Or even more probably it's because their ideas are becoming more in vogue and they're well connected to those in power. Politics always plays a role, sad to say.

Nor do I have to address the content if the source is shit. I'm not looking at info from the Center for Immigration Studies or any of David Horowitz's bullshit, you better believe I'm not looking at fucking right wing Heterodox Academy bullshit that tries to dash legitimate leftist criticisms from college kids under the caricatured umbrella of whiny coddled kids who need safe spaces from the horrors of microaggressions, while ignoring real campus problems like unreported rapes in addition to rape being overall treated VERY lightly by campus police and authorities. Or how there's an under-representation of literature and overall contributions from POC and women. I could go on.

PS. Quillette is alt-right propaganda and Claire Lehmann used to write about the science of human biodiversity. Check your sources please.

14. He's encouraging part-time work as the norm for women as a solution to the gender gap in tech. When Google's diversity quotas are already a joke, that speaks for itself.

15. No, when you say that women are naturally uninterested in tech or that they need part-time work because they can't take the heat, that's a direct accusation of incompetence in different wording here. This is a textbook example of concern trolling here. That doesn't even get into his statements after the fact about how he downplays the role of women in early tech as "just accounting." You even said earlier that a positive interpretation of that remark is that clearly computing has evolved since then, which is adding insult to injury. You're also dead wrong on Giglio's article. She had a lot more to say than just stuff related to emotional intelligence. That's your own, ahem, strawman. That's your problem, not mine, and whether it's deliberate or accidental, I'm not going to bear the burden for you.

16. Misrepresenting Costa too. Not bad. When then article outright says that behavior is due to social roles rather than traits, yeah, that is a strike against Damore. You're also randomly associating Lippa and stupid fucking Schmitt again with this study. From the abstract alone, the Lippa study even presupposes that we have a good amount of gender equality to begin with. That's the same problem with Schmitt, who for all his recognition that gender differences mostly overlap and Damore is incorrectly using his work, actually thinks a 10-20% or whatever low number of POC and female representation at Google is proof that Google is actually using affirmative action and isn't instead a shitty fuckin company.

For all that, even if the Lippa and Schmitt studies are correct or relevant (or both), it still has jack to do with Damore and the gender gap in tech.

17. Yes you did shut Spelke down. If you take issue with her association with the Recode article, show that and argue for it. Don't just assume it. It's not my place to do so, and it fits in with the rest of your earlier sweeping dismissal of the Recode article as leftist bias.

But still uh...

http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~mliu/chair/misc/MathAptitude.pdf

A simple Google search is all it takes. You don't need to take a bunch of studies and tangentially tie them together, the facts are there. The facts have already been written. You're practically reinventing the wheel here.

18. Not looking at a study from shitty Quillette, and yes, most people DO look at representation of populations as evidence of discrimination being present or not. Get the fuck out of here.

19. The consequence of free choice explanations is just code word for saying that people are indoctrinated into a discriminatory society. It ties into the problem of how interest is conveyed. Even with the MeToo movement, fuckin Terry Crews of all people is being subject to psychology tests like a good deal of rape victims are, casting doubt on his profile and sanity instead of taking issue with the rapist as is. Lots of people argue that maybe men shouldn't have to deal with all the hurdles they do contend with and think they deserve as much spotlight as feminists do, but the instant he steps forward, a good deal of MRAs and similar parties, you know those people concerned with men's rights, take the opportunity to shit all over him. This kind of thinking goes out of it's way to ignore the elephant in the room and argue that free choice is even a thing.

Don't care for the rest of it. Yes the world is a horrible place and there's still a lot of racists and sexists out there. Lots of them in the higher echelons of society, including science. Saying otherwise is old-fashioned just world theory apologetics, and you're willfully closing your ears off to anything else. You're practically saying that just because they're not over the top swastika wearing assholes that they can't be racist. That's practically the strategy of much of the alt-right today, look at the way they organize after Charlottesville, look at the very concept of platforming people. You have a lot of nerve to take on Pinker's rosy view of the world, especially now when the IPCC just released a report on just how bad climate change is. As much as the media likes to emphasize how much the individual can cut down on emissions, the whole mass of common people could go back to the Stone Age and the world would still in trouble because 71% of emissions come from only 100 megacorps in the whole world.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

But you don't tend to hear about that. Even if you did, good luck on actually dismantling these shitheads anytime soon. These fuckers have their fingers deep in society and they ain't change without one hell of a fight. That's of course assuming said change would be permanent, and they'd either resume their old ways or find some other way to be assholes.

And of course, you actually don't think Milo Yiannopoulos is a Nazi. That speaks volumes more than anything I could say and why you continue to scream yourself hoarse in face of the evidence and ignore all my salient points that are now officially in PRATT territory. QED. James Earl Cash (talk) 21:21, 17 October 2018 (UTC)