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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."
I don't he's right in this regard. His original analysis of intellectual monoculture was better. I say this because also normal people are also having similar problems. I think the line of reasoning proposed by Mr. Damore here is dangerous as it implies that difficulties to conform to the lunacy of this new authorian left is some sort of mental illness. We've seen that before and it wasn't pretty.
Knowing what angers the modern intelligenzia requires constant following of their social media environment. I believe that is, in part, the purpose of the whole thing. For example, they don't make noice about trans-people because they are worried about their well being. (If they would, they would ask them for an opinion and figure out quite quickly that they don't want to be the battle ground of the next proxy culture war. On the contrary, they want to be left alone.) The whole point is to signal ideolgical group identity and demand conformity.
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. The scales are tipped the way they are these days because of corrupt men at the top taking what they feel is entitled to them, including unwanted groping, kissing, and outright rape. While the general public may be shocked by what is transpiring, it has been known to HR departments for decades. In the case of the major tech firm I used to work for, it was always quietly dealt with or outright swept under the rug, paying a quiet settlement and forcing the victim into a nondisclosure agreement. The victimizer got a slap on the wrist but was consideres too important to let go. That's the backdrop for this memo and why it landed with a wet splat. It is callous to those who have had illegal things done to them against their will at work. Those are just the women with the courage to come forward. Many never speak out.
I don't have much sympathy for DaMoore, he could have made his helpful suggestions directly to HR. He wanted the most attention though. It was a totally voluntary thing he did. Ducking behind autism doesn't save him and doesn't make what he did less callous or more correct. His memo reads like the old trope of telling women to smile more to the eyes of someone with this background.
Posted as A.C. for obvious reasons.
An official diagnosis (which I got 23 years ago at age 46) can provide the excuses you mention - but it doesn't have to. An individual's awareness of their own profile of cognitive strengths and weaknesses can lead them to seek workarounds for, or make extra effort in, problem areas. Other people's informed awareness can lead them to try meeting an autistic individual halfway in reaching understanding; a useful strategy in general. Neither of those sound anything like a retreat...
Are you saying that testosterone and estrogen don't give men and women different benefits? Men, on average, have significantly higher levels of testosterone than women. Woman, on average, have significantly higher levels of estrogen than men. These biological differences make them better and worse at different things. It's an objective fact.
All you've done is rephrase it so someone's PC narrative mind doesn't get hurt in the process, to which I say, who cares?
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.
That's a subjective observation.
Not a single thing you wrote covers the fact that men and women are different, in part, due to biology. You're not even trying to refute it. No, instead, you would rather sort to name calling and telling me to fuck off precisely because you don't have an argument.
Flamebait means it is designed to provoke an emotional response, specifically offense and anger. Calling something flamebait is literally saying it offends you.
There is no -1 Disagree or -1 Wrong mod. The correct response is to post a rebuttal. A rebuttal to the actual argument, not an accusation of malice.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Objectively, your opening statement is wrong. Plenty of people disputed the facts, found it controversial, and were offended by its message.
The statements in the memo, even when citing existing research, can hardly be called obvious or mundane. Acknowledged experts in the relevant fields dispute the finding, and argue interpretation. And bringing together subjective, and emotionally charged subjects such a business, gender, culture and bias are hardly benign - that's a high overlap with the list of causes for most conflicts.
That aside, my principle objection to the memo is it is completely missing a "so what" component. Let's assume the everything Damore says is objectively true (I don't agree with this, obviously), so what? He makes no argument that Google, or society, or the code that gets written by software engineers will in any way be objectively better. Whether that is measured by (subjective criteria anyway) the quality of the code, the business performance that results, the number of people killed or injured by faulty code, etc. he's silent on the subject. About all we can take away from the memo is that he, subjectively, thinks Google could be a better place for him to work at, if Google followed his suggestions. Since he no longer works at Google, the point is moot.
As a final point. It's been noted that Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, despite having female engineers making up only ~20-30% of their workforce are anyway above the industry average. And look, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are objectively out-performing the majority of their peers across most business metrics and most "nice places to work" metrics. So following Damore's suggestion would likely decrease the quality of the workplace environment for the majority of people at Google, risk reducing the quality of the business output of Google, and further exacerbate gender and equality issues in businesses across Silicon Valley.
Americans with Disabilities Act. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a strong case. He wrote a memo and circulated it internally for feedback. In a sane world, people in the company would have said that his logic is okay, but his axioms are backed up by some quite non-representative and cherry-picked studies. He would then have been pointed at some other sources and modified the document before circulating it more widely. Instead, the memo was sent to the press and Google fired him for embarrassing the company, which amounts to firing him for being autistic (and is illegal under the ADA).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well, no, the issue was that he ignored decades of arguments on this subject, but that they didn't exist. People assumed that if he had done that much research he must have been aware of them, and ignoring them is a common tactic used by actual misogynists.
To be clear I don't think he was being malicious or that he hates women, he just tried to tackle a very difficult subject (because it relates to people he works with every day) in a very badly misjudged way. He ended up sounding like a typical "rational" misogynist, and didn't make any effort (even to this day) to clarify.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I am autistic and I too have that same difficulty that James Damore has. I always have someone else look at a letter or document first to get their interpretation, even when I am invited to give my own unadulterated opinion. Why? Well, in the neurotypical (i.e. non-autistic) world people rarely say what they mean. The hidden meaning behind this opinion invitation could be, "Please compliment and flatter my decision or do not bother me. You risk sneaky retaliation if you disagree." I have to remember that the workplace is not a democracy, and in rigid oligarchies, you tow the line or your expunged.
James Damore made the classic mistake that some high functioning autistics make, they fire from the hip and sometimes act impulsively in matters that they are unable to understand or visualize the ultimate outcome. I found that it was key to recognizing this to make my behaviour more socially acceptable and I had to learn how to put myself in someone else's shoes, so to speak. If I have to send a letter or document that I even suspect might offend or alienate, I *always* have a neutral third party read it and then tell me their interpretation. Also, like some people on the sprectrum, I tend to have no filter and do not suffer fools very well so I have to take extra caution when dealing with people so I do not alienate them.
I actually suspect that James Damore was not really fired as a result of his memo itself but rather as a result of a behavioral-threat model. Damore's memo might have erroneously pinged a warning sign for workplace violence and Google let him go out of an abundance of caution. This is also the problem with the classic behavioral-threat model, it is geared towards analysis of non-autistic behaviour. Autistic behaviour could easily be misinterpreted as potentially dangerous. Most autistics however do not suffer from anti-social personality disorder or psychopathy. The differences between classic autism and Anti-Social Personality Disorder are rather stark. The easiest way for Google to rid itself of this perceived threat was just to terminate him for discrimination.
Nobody gave a flying fuck when Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham openly admitted to being rapists and pedophiles.
There was a lot of backlash over the Dunham story (and there still is every time Dunham comes up). The story also gets misquoted quite a bit to make it sound worse than it was, just to add to the backlash.
The Schumer thing was drunk sex and it's up to the guy she slept with to decide whether it was rape. Until he comes forward and says otherwise, it's not up to you to decide whether he was consenting or not.
It's also kinda crappy that you wrote the above sentence in way that intentionally suggests Schumer is a pedophile. That actually meets the requirement of malice that's needed to make you guilty of violating defamation laws.
Hell a Welsh Labor MP killed himself because he was suspended on charges he wasn't even allowed to know.
He was suspended while allegations of sexual misconduct were investigated. He didn't have specific details, but he knew what he was being investigated for.
It's fun how you have sympathy for the man suffering the consequences of his sexual misconduct while you seem to feel the women aren't suffering enough. What point between having their reputation smeared and them committing suicide do you feel is the right level of backlash?
The memo was badly written, poorly cited and badly researched. He misrepresents and misunderstands statistics, biology, gender determinism and psychology. https://medium.com/@tweetingmo...
None of that warranted his firing, but what DID was that he was making himself known as a bad actor in the environment at google. Because they do both peer and manager reviews, he basically painted a big red flag on himself because there was no way to tell if heâ(TM)d be sufficiently objective when reviewing female teammates. Women were already blacklisting him (apparently google employees keep internal blacklists, which Iâ(TM)m not sure is a great idea) and it really just demonstrated a lack of decent judgement. Nobody would be able to promote him, and he generated an outsized amount of strife for a single employee. From a business perspective, he was a humongous operational liability.
Being spectrum absolves him of none of this. We all know spectrum people, and I know plenty that are capable of learning rules to keep them out of trouble because theyâ(TM)re aware theyâ(TM)re not good at understanding social signals. Itâ(TM)s not a problem that heâ(TM)s spectrum, itâ(TM)s a problem that he generally has bad judgement.
Well functioning teams are critical to making good progress and he was clearly an impediment to that, no matter whether you agree with his memo or not.
It is good that he started reflecting. But he still has a long way to go.
To address a problem, one must first admit that they have a problem. James Damore attempted to address disparity issues in a rational, scientific manner. He relied on the research that was at hand, and made a few assumptions. Approaching a social problem scientifically and methodically is befitting a high functioning autistic person. I know because my family is full of them.
Whether his facts are right or wrong, does not negate the fact that he tried to start the conversation. Society is simply not ready to listen or even engage, instead deferring to labeling James a misogynist.
Under pressure, Google executives lack the will to approach the subject rationally. No matter the content of the paper, Google executives were concerned that the fallout could hurt sales. Google executives took the easy way out by firing James Damore and publicly distancing themselves from his paper. If they were really interested in solving the problem of wage disparity, gender gaps, and racism in the workplace, they might also try using the scientific method. The first steps of which are:
-Ask a question
-Do background research
-Construct a hypothesis
Let's try this out with a similar question: If children are our most precious resource, then why are day care workers (who are mostly female) paid so poorly?
Now, do the background research, construct a hypothesis, update your resume, and prepare to be crucified.
people break NDAs privately to their friends all the fucking time.
Sounds like a character issue. I wouldn't trust a person who violates an NDA.
True that. The leakers who intentionally got him fired for an internal memo need to be outed and canned.
It was a poorly research psuedo-sciencey political manifesto, couched in a lot of faux-rational language. Anyone with half a brain recognizes it immediately for what it was.
I personally wouldn't have fired him for it, but I would have shut that shit down. Google was dealing with a near-mutiny of offended internal engineers and real consequences for their ability to recruit, so I don't fault them too much for making the business decision to fire the guy.
"When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say."
That's nice and all but given we're arguing on a thread about something Mr. Damore said, it's not like he's been silenced now is it?
If you follow the way the thread has gone, it all fits into place.
Something tells me your actual problem with me is that you do not want anyone who has a different opinion in the workplace. Which happens to coincide with your opinion. And that you belive that Damore deserved firing because his opinion hurt women? That a safe space, or in other words, a bubble is needed becuse some groups cannot tolerate people like Damore. Conjecture on my part, but why tou've decided to weigh in and declare me offtopic when a cursory examination of th ethread shows where things were going.
Thir great irony is that the safe space demanded by some women and many liberals is exactly the same sort of Bubbleworld that is practiced by many Fox News listeners. Self validation.
Me? I like hearing different viewpoints. Why? Because some conservative ideas work. Because some liberal ideas work.
But both have enough bullshit in the mix that you have to separate the wheat from the chaff to find the good stuff.
Damore was a dumb asshole. He deserved firing. Not because he had a different opinion, but because he should have foreseen the results of his expressing it. He was in an environment that was an enforced safe space.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When you have a permitted opinion, you are allowed to commit any atrocity, and you will be praised for it.
Woah, calm down on the hyperbole there, boy.
Seriously. How do you think religious wars start and have occurred throughout most of history. You simply have your gawd or ideology construct "the other" and then you destroy them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.