Jordan Peterson

[aelf]

Oh, good to know that you're a gross sexist too.

That's unfair. Let's just say Eastern European cultural norms are different.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

But yeah, trying to criticize diversity initiatives is just a stupid idea.

Why is it? I don't see how placing something above criticism is ever a wise choice, and that seems to be the main thrust of his "manifesto".

 

[Senethro]

There should be no Sacred Cows and all, but....

"What if the racists and sexists were right all along?" isn't exactly useful or even particularly original input.

 

[stinkubus]

Why is it? I don't see how placing something above criticism is ever a wise choice, and that seems to be the main thrust of his "manifesto".

Because the choice is a moral one and not a matter of calculation. The inevitable result of opposition to multiculturalism is unjustifiable violence.

 

[Bootstoots]

Why is it? I don't see how placing something above criticism is ever a wise choice, and that seems to be the main thrust of his "manifesto".

I don't think it actually should be that way, at least for constructive criticism like this. But the way things actually are, doing this sort of thing is risky.

Also, they fired him only after it got leaked to the public and got shared by lots of people. Creating a PR disaster is a really reliable way to get fired anywhere. Again, I don't think that should be the case, and I think it is worrying that online mobs of people can induce companies to fire their employees.

 

[Lexicus]

constructive criticism

No. This is nonsense. This was not intended to be 'constructive criticism' of anything. It was most likely intended as a troll move so that Damore could attempt to spin a narrative of martyrdom. He is apparently attempting to milk this with a lawsuit against Google.

 

[Bootstoots]

No. This is nonsense. This was not intended to be 'constructive criticism' of anything. It was most likely intended as a troll move so that Damore could attempt to spin a narrative of martyrdom. He is apparently attempting to milk this with a lawsuit against Google.

The memo reads as constructive criticism and certainly doesn't appear to be an attempt to get fired, although Damore later went on to sue Google and run around on the right-wing media circuit. This seems to be something he did only after his firing, though.

Is there some reason to believe it actually was meant to be a publicity stunt where he could tout his martyrdom? And if so, why start out by posting it only on Google's internal forums?

 

[Lexicus]

The memo reads as constructive criticism

Maybe we didn't read the same memo. To me it reads like typical concern trolling from racists and misogynists. You can see similar crap from posters on CFC who advocate for disgusting scientific racism and couch it in a pretense of concern for all the problems supposedly caused by society taking the illusion of equality seriously.

Is there some reason to believe it actually was meant to be a publicity stunt where he could tout his martyrdom? And if so, why start out by posting it only on Google's internal forums?

Only a hunch. I find it highly unlikely that Damore was quite as stupid or unsophisticated as he would have to be to actually believe that he was doing something constructive by submitting that memo. The thing is like a textbook example of creating a hostile work environment.

 

[metalhead]

All of these are well supported in the psychological literature - as well supported as anything is in psychology. Whether they're biological or cultural is open to debate, but most do appear to some extent or another across cultures. Average personality differences likely are part of the reason for the underrepresentation of women in computing and engineering, along with the overrepresentation of women in the social sciences and increasingly biology and several fields of medicine. And, to Damore's credit, he does suggest ways to increase the number of women and improve their working conditions.

This takes us right back to the rub of it all, which is that while you are correct and the idea of observable gender differences which are most likely due in part to nature, this idea is often expressed as if it is the only relevant word on the matter. It is used to discredit the entirety of feminist equality efforts by boiling the entirety of gender inequity to some simplistic, "100% nature" argument that is laughable the moment you dedicate serious thought to it.

 

[Ryika]

Maybe we didn't read the same memo.

It's your ideological lens that makes you read it that way. Try reading it from a neutral point of view, without already ascribing intentions to his words before even allowing him to make his points, and I'm sure it will sound a lot more neutral to you.

This takes us right back to the rub of it all, which is that while you are correct and the idea of observable gender differences which are most likely due in part to nature, this idea is often expressed as if it is the only relevant word on the matter. It is used to discredit the entirety of feminist equality efforts by boiling the entirety of gender inequity to some simplistic, "100% nature" argument that is laughable the moment you dedicate serious thought to it.

Neither the memo, nor most people who agree with him, claim that it's 100% nature. Quite the opposite, in the memo he very much says that he does not ascribe to the "100% nature"-argument, and instead explains that he does not know how much is nature and how is nurture. The argument is that ignoring nature entirely - which, in his opinion, these courses do - misses an important part of the equation.

I personally have never, not once, see anybody who's a big name argue that it's only nature. The argument that comes closest to that is the argument that "nurture follows from nature", which of course is also a correct statement but does not tell us anything useful.

Overall, the people who object to those "other people" who claim that it's 100% nature seem to be arguing against strawmen from my perspective. If there's anybody saying that, then that's a small minority of extremists, it's certainly the mainstream opinion in the opposition.

 

[sophie]

Try reading it from a neutral point of view

There's no such thing.

 

[Ryika]

There's no such thing.

Yeah, in the same way that perfection doesn't exist.
And yet, when we improve our skill in something, we still work towards perfection, knowing that we can never achieve it.

The same is true with Neutrality, probably even more so. Trying to not let ones biases cloud the meaning of the thing we're reading isn't even that hard, at least to a certain extend, one just has to be willing to do it. One cannot free oneself completely from the things one believes, but one should be able to get close enough.

A person who cannot do that, is not more than an ideological drone.

 

[Bootstoots]

Maybe we didn't read the same memo. To me it reads like typical concern trolling from racists and misogynists. You can see similar crap from posters on CFC who advocate for disgusting scientific racism and couch it in a pretense of concern for all the problems supposedly caused by society taking the illusion of equality seriously.

I mean, it is a complaint about Google's diversity practices, and it makes arguments of the sort that are used by people who oppose affirmative action. He doesn't do himself any favors by calling these practices "veiled neo-Marxism" (he must have been listening to JP before this). On the other hand, though, he does recommend a list of practices Google could do to make itself a better place for women. Those suggestions incorporate the group differences between men and women that appear in psychological tests, but they do read as sincere suggestions. Here they are:

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and how we can address them to increase women’s representation in tech without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

• Women show a higher interest in people and men in things
  • We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).
• Women are more cooperative
  • Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there’s more we can do, especially in our interviews.
  • This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education.
• Women are more prone to anxiety
  • Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.
• Women look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status
  • Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men will be disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing part time work though can keep more women in tech.
• The male gender role is currently inflexible
  • 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, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally “feminine” roles.

I don't know what the difference is between having sincere concerns and "concern trolling". I classify this memo more in the sincere concern category than as trolling, but obviously you disagree. It's a subjective classification so there's no way to say who is right or wrong.

I don't agree with his conclusions, largely because of how few women and non-Asian minorities work for Google (or Silicon Valley tech companies in general). It seems obvious that whatever diversity efforts they are making, they don't have much effect.

Only a hunch. I find it highly unlikely that Damore was quite as stupid or unsophisticated as he would have to be to actually believe that he was doing something constructive by submitting that memo. The thing is like a textbook example of creating a hostile work environment.

He claims to be autistic. If true, that would explain quite a bit.

I don't see how this particular memo creates a hostile work environment. If he had expressed a view that women were generally unqualified to work there, or that sexual harassment concerns were not valid, or something like that, this would be a different story. But as it is, he says that he does wish to increase the number of women at Google and improve their work environment. He's just expressing a belief that current diversity practices are misguided, supported by well-established facts (although I do not think they imply his conclusion). Some of it should be re-worded, e.g. by replacing "neuroticism" with "susceptibility to anxiety" and dropping the right-wing internet lingo (like "neo-Marxism" and equating political correctness with authoritarianism). Overall, though, his argument does express apparently sincere concerns and could not reasonably be interpreted as hostile.

This takes us right back to the rub of it all, which is that while you are correct and the idea of observable gender differences which are most likely due in part to nature, this idea is often expressed as if it is the only relevant word on the matter. It is used to discredit the entirety of feminist equality efforts by boiling the entirety of gender inequity to some simplistic, "100% nature" argument that is laughable the moment you dedicate serious thought to it.

Yeah, and the differences that show up between men and women in psychological studies tend to be on the order of 0.5 standard deviations, if that. So there's a lot of overlap between groups. If for some trait Population X averages higher than Population Y by 0.5 standard deviations and both curves are normal bell curves, then 31% of Population Y will still have higher level of that trait than the average for Population X. It would be ludicrous to make any decisions about individuals based on statistical differences like this. In human societies, it's obvious that some amount of the gender differences we observe is environmental; exactly how much is virtually impossible to measure.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

There should be no Sacred Cows and all, but....

Because the choice is a moral one and not a matter of calculation. The inevitable result of opposition to multiculturalism is unjustifiable violence.

I don't think it actually should be that way, at least for constructive criticism like this. But the way things actually are, doing this sort of thing is risky.

Also, they fired him only after it got leaked to the public and got shared by lots of people. Creating a PR disaster is a really reliable way to get fired anywhere. Again, I don't think that should be the case, and I think it is worrying that online mobs of people can induce companies to fire their employees.

I suppose a 33% meaningful reply rate is pretty good, I'll take that.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't know what the difference is between having sincere concerns and "concern trolling". I classify this memo more in the sincere concern category than as trolling, but obviously you disagree. It's a subjective classification so there's no way to say who is right or wrong.

It's not really a subjective classification, and there are drugs we could probably use to get Damore to tell us the truth. But from where we're sitting, you're quite right.

con·cern trol·ling
noun
informalderogatory

1. the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion.

He claims to be autistic. If true, that would explain quite a bit.

It's funny, I know a couple of autistic people who also somehow manage to not be sexist little ***** in public.

I don't see how this particular memo creates a hostile work environment.

Overall, though, his argument does express apparently sincere concerns and could not reasonably be interpreted as hostile.

Let's put it this way. If I were to release a memo that began by asserting that science shows black people are less good at intellectual tasks than white people, and suggested some things we could do to make black people feel "at home" at my workplace despite this difference between black and white people, how do you think my black coworkers would take it?

 

[Ryika]

Let's put it this way. If I were to release a memo that began by asserting that science shows black people are less good at intellectual tasks than white people, and suggested some things we could do to make black people feel "at home" at my workplace despite this difference between black and white people, how do you think my black coworkers would take it?

Thankfully, the memo does not do such a thing, and instead just goes into detail about how men and women work better in different situations and that, because women and men have different environments in which they prosper, it might make sense to offer more of those environments, to naturally attract more females.

Iirc, the main argument he makes is that females on average prosper more in a work-environment that is group-focused, while men work better on their own. Given that, in his opinion, a lot of the programming tasks at google, are designed for people who work alone, he concludes that maybe, more jobs that allow for group-work could be created.

There's nothing condescending about that. To claim so, is to say that being a person who works best in groups is inferior to being a person who works best on their own.

Again, ideological lens, you just read what you want to read, not what he actually said.

 

[Bootstoots]

It's not really a subjective classification, and there are drugs we could probably use to get Damore to tell us the truth. But from where we're sitting, you're quite right.

con·cern trol·ling
noun
informalderogatory

1. the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion.

Sure, what I meant to say is that I don't know of a way to tell what concerns are sincere and what is simply concern trolling.

Let's put it this way. If I were to release a memo that began by asserting that science shows black people are less good at intellectual tasks than white people, and suggested some things we could do to make black people feel "at home" at my workplace despite this difference between black and white people, how do you think my black coworkers would take it?

His memo doesn't do anything like that, though. There's nothing there about how most women are less effective at programming, much less anything about their intellectual abilities overall. He talks about interest and personality differences, not ability differences.

 

[Senethro]

I suppose a 33% meaningful reply rate is pretty good, I'll take that.

Consider it a level you should aspire to attain!

 

[Lexicus]

His memo doesn't do anything like that, though.

It does exactly that. It sets out a list of things women are supposedly better at than men and then claims that tech jobs don't incorporate these things enough and that's why there aren't as many women in tech. It is no different than saying that (just as an example) black people are underrepresented among CEOs because they are biologically wired to be worse at the kinds of things CEOs do, and then pretending you "care" about the "problem" by suggesting some changes to the CEO working conditions that would make black people find the job easier.

I think ultimately this discussion is colored by the fact that I believe the gender-related differences in outcome we observe are almost entirely due to sexist discrimination (in case it's unclear, I mean something wider than simple hiring discrimination - I'm talking about the whole cultural apparatus of gender roles that creates different expectations for women) whereas you agree with Damore that some, perhaps even most, of the difference is due to innate biological difference.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Because the choice is a moral one and not a matter of calculation. The inevitable result of opposition to multiculturalism is unjustifiable violence.

How does that assertion stack up with violence rate wrt this topic in various parts of the world?

Also, they fired him only after it got leaked to the public and got shared by lots of people. Creating a PR disaster is a really reliable way to get fired anywhere. Again, I don't think that should be the case, and I think it is worrying that online mobs of people can induce companies to fire their employees.

That's worrying, and so is the decision as to how much coverage a potential "PR disaster" gets, which is conveniently variable.

No. This is nonsense. This was not intended to be 'constructive criticism' of anything. It was most likely intended as a troll move so that Damore could attempt to spin a narrative of martyrdom. He is apparently attempting to milk this with a lawsuit against Google.

Having read the memo, Google's misrepresentation of this, and some of the allegations being made there's a good chance he has a case. More an indictment of Google though, which has shown active dishonesty and dirty practices enough to avoid giving them any benefit of the doubt.

I believe the gender-related differences in outcome we observe are almost entirely due to sexist discrimination

That belief would need a lot of evidence to pay rent. You can alter preferred tasks to a degree at the individual level just by screwing with hormones and observing the behavior of that one person, and a variety of hormones will do this. I experienced a test case of this directly.

It would be foolish to discard societal/environmental factors, and it would be foolish to discard genetic factors that impact someone directly, regardless of what those factors are. If you want to set policy that works with empirical reality, it's imprudent to ignore empirical reality.