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'I See Things Differently': James Damore on his Autism and the Google Memo (theguardian.com)
"James Damore opens up about his regrets -- and how autism may have shaped his experience of the world," writes the west coast bureau chief for the Guardian. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The experience has prompted some introspection. In the course of several weeks of conversation using Google's instant messaging service, which Damore prefers to face-to-face communication, he opened up about an autism diagnosis that may in part explain the difficulties he experienced with his memo. He believes he has a problem understanding how his words will be interpreted by other people... It wasn't until his mid-20s, after completing research in computational biology at Princeton and MIT, and starting a PhD at Harvard, that Damore was diagnosed with autism, although he was told he had a milder version of the condition known as "high-functioning autism"...
Damore argues that Google's focus on avoiding "micro-aggressions" is "much harder for someone with autism to follow". But he stops short of saying autistic employees should be given more leniency if they unintentionally offend people at work. "I wouldn't necessarily treat someone differently," he explains. "But it definitely helps to understand where they're coming from." I ask Damore if, looking back over the last few months, he feels that his difficult experience with the memo and social media may be related to being on the spectrum. "Yeah, there's definitely been some self-reflection," he says. "Predicting controversies requires predicting what emotional reaction people will have to something. And that's not something that I excel at -- although I'm working on it."
Damore argues that Google's focus on avoiding "micro-aggressions" is "much harder for someone with autism to follow". But he stops short of saying autistic employees should be given more leniency if they unintentionally offend people at work. "I wouldn't necessarily treat someone differently," he explains. "But it definitely helps to understand where they're coming from." I ask Damore if, looking back over the last few months, he feels that his difficult experience with the memo and social media may be related to being on the spectrum. "Yeah, there's definitely been some self-reflection," he says. "Predicting controversies requires predicting what emotional reaction people will have to something. And that's not something that I excel at -- although I'm working on it."
...He's a snowflake. Trolling aside, apparently Damore was "wronged" our society, but let's not forget that women and minorities are ALSO wronged by our society, and in my opinion THIS problem is much larger scale/urgent/severe... BTW I tend to agree with his girlfriend "She maintains Damore was, for the most part, naive and wrong..." His mild autism should make him very cautious before opening up in a public setting. We need more simple tools like "The Rock Test" https://medium.com/@annevictor... to help people like him and "nerdy-nerds" participate fully in our society without offending/hurting others. Anyway good to see that the guy is not necessarily set on his views and apparently is listening...
I see the point of your analogy - it's a good one, except that it's undermined by the fact that while what you say about death and meaning is true, Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.
He's just another brotard (one of many who have crawled out from under their rocks in the wake of gamergate and the rise of trumpist nazi-ism) who accidentally stumbled into a little notoriety with some offensive disparagement of women and is now using autism as an excuse for his arsehole behaviour.
Autism may well make human interaction difficult for him, but he lives in a world full of humans and it's up to him to figure out - by himself, or with help if he needs it - how to live in it without clumsily pissing other people off.
Claiming autism as an excuse is the "trigger" defence of the brotard and (just as those who are easily triggered have no right to expect that others will know about - or give a fuck about - their triggers), he has no right to expect that others will know or give a fuck that his obnoxiousness is connected to his autism. It's certainly not an excuse that deserves instant forgiveness, he'll have to do a fuck of a lot more than that.
It is good that he started reflecting. But he still has a long way to go. He got a friendly journalist for this article and that is OK, since he also got a lot of the other kind lately.
But even this author cannot help noticing, that he has been cherry-picking and using studies where even their authors say, that his conclusion are not supported by the studies. It is not presenting (disputed) facts that drew the fire to him, but putting them into an invalid context to (badly) veil his misogynistic undertones.
In my impression his (not well written) memo was mainly a whiny complaint about brilliant men like him having to put up with diversity issues. It is rather that attitude that will make him hard to employ because companies (like Google did) will judge him to be a risk for their image. And I do not see him working on this issue yet.
His bad luck was that this memo drew a lot of attention. But he did everything to get this attention and to his own demise he succeeded with it.
I hope he will not end up as a pariah in the tech industry. But two things need to happen for that: He has to fully understand what he did and others need to give him a second chance. The chances for either do not seem good at the moment.
Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.
That's a very cheap claim to make without any reasoning.
It's been reasoned many times before. For example here are two rather well written articles about it:
https://www.quora.com/What-do-...
https://www.economist.com/news...
Now, the defenses in respnse to these articles involve giving huge amounts of benefit of the doubt to the point of ignoring almost everything implied or that follows from the arguments in the memo. That's one option I guess except that here's James Damore in his own words:
https://www.salon.com/2017/09/...
https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...
https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...
I think it's clear from these comments that my (and others) inferences about where the memo was coming from were actually correct.
Anyway bring on the -1 trollbait mods! If there's one thing James Damore supporters can't stand it's the free speech they claim to support.
And one more thing: if you actually support some varian of improving things for men, then don't support this guy and his bullshit about gender roles. If you've ever pointed out how few men there are in certain jobs here, then don't support Damore's bullshit about gender roles because that is enforcing that separation. If you've ever complained about how men often pursue dangerous, but well paid jobs (contributing to increase workplace deaths for men) then don't spport this gender role bullshit because that's where a lot of the pressure comes from.
IOW this bullshit is bad for men and women. If you're a man and not a feminist you should still not support it because its bad for you. This guy and his army of supportes are trying to coerce you into a mould whether you want to be in it or not via this enforcement of gender roles.
It should be your choice not theirs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He made a comment without realizing that other people would react to it. He is now saying that the same thing happened with his memo.
What exactly are you arguing for here? That free speech should be denied if pointing out someone's lack of awareness makes them uncomfortable? Or that people should merely self-censor if it might upset someone?
Speaking of projection...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It was a statement that needs about as much reasoning and evidence to back it up as "fire is hot".
while there are some circumstances where evidence and reasoning might be required for such a statement, conversational english is not a physics conference, nor does it always have to involve wasting hours giving free remedial education to misogynist retards.
No, that's not all I've done.
I'll give you a concrete, personalised example to make it easier for you to understand:
If I say that you, personally, Kneo24, whoever the fuck you are in real life, are a fucking moron then that's not sexist. That's just a factual observation.
If I were to say that all, or even most, men are fucking morons then that WOULD be sexist. And it wouldn't be at all hard to find examples to disprove it.
see, that's the difference between loathing an individual for what they say or do rather than an entire class of people for what they happen to be? simple, right? and obvious.
now fuck off back under your rock.
beg away, although you really don't need my permission to be wrong.
Did he say that? All I see is that he might have misjudged the fallout. Doesn't mean he would have acted any differently though.
"Fallout" is one way to put it. But how about results? I thought we were all a fan of the possibly apocryphal Einstein quote about insanity. If you get poor results, and you keep on in the same vein, you're an incompetent at best. I thought this was supposed to be a meritocratic bunch of nerds here. (Once, I probably really did... but we can talk about growing up later.) If this guy is incompetent at best, why do we care what he has to say? Even if he's right, which he probably isn't, I'll wait for someone more eloquent to come along and make the point properly.
Regardless, he makes several unsupported statements in his little memo of failure, so his logic is suspect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> If you want to see why there was such a backlash to his memo, I think it can be made clearer in light of the #metoo discussion we are presently having.
I don't see why. The memo didn't deal with rape at work in any kind of way. It had a different subject.
Wait, seriously? You can't see how these things are related? You don't think you're smart, do you? It's all one world. Everything is related. Do you really need a flowchart drawn for you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My grandfather was tortured by marxists. /s
I won't feel "safe" as long as marxists draw breath in this world.
My lived experience trumps everything so I can't be proven wrong nor can my reality be subordinated to any other.
Also, because I'm a progressive mind-reading psychic, all marxist thought and speech, however benign on the surface, carry implicit violence that only I can determine and everyone has to defer to me as to where, how, and to what degree they manifest in regular everyday speech. I don't care what you say, only what you "imply", and I know exactly the kind of evil bigotry you're implying with those sweet saccharine words of goodness. Now, I think you sound like a bad person. If you disagree or protest, I'm going point out how that's exactly what bad people do when they are called out which then proves you're bad.
I'm a minority Asian so down modding me is violence, all you mod point privileged shitlords I know who you are.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
What is your evidence that they are opportunistic? Almost all so far have been either admitted or supported by strong evidence.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>Women have always been poor losers
Most of the time a man will let you know he hates you, why, and eventually try to stab you in the face. It's not unusual for a woman to secretly nurse a grudge and plot for a long time about how best to stab you in the back, and any old superficially plausible justification will do. This starts with puberty and never really changes after that.
The people most effective at surviving in competitive environments can choose which method is best employed, regardless of their sex. And, in my opinion, the best kind of people use their understanding of the game to avoid it rather than play it.